---
title: "What 2 questions would you ask Kent Beck?"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/9/14/what-2-questions-would-you-ask-kent-beck.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2005/9/14/what-2-questions-would-you-ask-kent-beck.html"
published: "2005-09-14T22:58:00"
updated: "2005-09-14T22:58:00"
tags: ["Agile Related", "Interview"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "If you had an hour to talk with Kent Beck , a proud father of eXtreme Programming , and you could only ask two questions , what would you ask? I'll be interviewing Kent as part of my audio interview series this week. I…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# What 2 questions would you ask Kent Beck?

By Roy Osherove September 14, 2005 In [Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related), [Interview](https://osherove.com/blog/category/interview)

**Historical article** · Originally published September 14, 2005; technical details may be outdated.

If you had an hour to talk with [Kent Beck](http://c2.com/ppr/about/author/kent.html), a proud father of [eXtreme Programming](http://www.xprogramming.com/), and **you could only ask two questions**, what would you ask?

I'll be interviewing Kent as part of [my audio interview series](http://www.teamagile.com/mainpages/Interviews.html) this week. I promise to take into consideration any good questions that come up in the comments. One of the things we plan to talk about is the whole notion of "BDUF" ("Big Design Up Front") in agile projects, and we'll also touch on [the column that Joel On Software wrote on this subject](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html) (and [all the responses to it](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=joel+bduf)).

I await your inputs.

## More in Agile Related

[All posts in Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related)

- Nov 9, 2005

    ### [The Agile Blog](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/11/9/the-agile-blog.html)

- Oct 16, 2005

    ### [My Agile talk at Ireland Devs group finally has permanent links](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/10/16/my-agile-talk-at-ireland-devs-group-finally-has-permanent-li.html)

- Sep 14, 2005

    ### [New blog from NUnit primary maintainer - Charlie Poole](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/9/14/new-blog-from-nunit-primary-maintainer-charlie-poole.html)

- Sep 7, 2005

    ### [September at Agile Israel - Why Agile, and lessons learned from implementing SCRUM](https://osherove.com/blog/2005/9/7/september-at-agile-israel-why-agile-and-lessons-learned-from.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### Contact

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/