On today's show we're on the phone with the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and one of the founders of the Agile Manifesto, Kent Beck. Kent and Wolfgang discuss the relationship between XP and QA.

This will be our final podcast of 2005. Stay tuned, as we'll be returning in January with more testing topics. As always, if you've got feedback or a suggestion for a future episode, leave a comment or drop us an email.

• QA Podcast #9: Extreme Programming and QA With Kent Beck (MP3, 15 MB, 21:26)

Here are some quotes from today's show:

"10 years ago, when I started talking about the precursors to XP, programmers weren't writing tests, ever. But, there are a couple of trends that contribute to changing this. One is shorter and shorter software release cycles. If you have to release software once a month, you don't have time for a two-month QA cycle...The other large-scale trend is toward asking for more visibility and accountability in the software development process."

"In XP-style development, two people typically write code together. They're having a conversation--the keyboard is going back and forth. So you already have that second set of eyes looking at the code. Say you're working on the code, I might be thinking about the next test that we could be writing."

"You can't know what you don't know. Part of the XP philosophy is keeping your options open as long as possible. Rather than having a big architecture developed up front. In XP, you would develop the architecture along with the code along with the tests for the non-functional requirements."

Links for this conversation's topic:

• Getting Started with XP (PDF)
• Testing Resources for Extreme Programming
• Extreme Programming Explained

Technorati tags: quality assurance, qa, software testing, qa labs, podcast, requirements, agile development, extreme programming, kent beck