Clergyman's

Honest to God, I think Kent Beck's contribution to all this has been taking stuff that he and I discovered quietly together, or picked up from other programmers, and taking it to the limit. Taking it to the limit. And the fact that it actually holds up — and a lot of it improves — when taking it to the limit is why it should naturally be called ""Extreme."" Kent's single biggest contribution is being daring enough to say, ""This is all that matters, and we should do it all the time.
- Ward Cunningham

When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.
- Ward Cunningham

I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.
- Ward Cunningham

There is a programming smell here… which is kind of like the smell in your refrigerator, you know. There's a sign that there's something wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. But you know if you leave it there, its only going to get worse.
- Ward Cunningham

When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.
- Ward Cunningham

We erased a problem by not trying to erase the problem, by saying, ""This is in the nature of what we do."" It's really weird that it could be that simple.
- Ward Cunningham

One’s words are a gift to the community. For the wiki nature to take whole, you have to let go of your words. You have to be okay with that. This goes into the name, called refactoring. To collaborate on a work, one must trust. The reason the cooperation happens is we are people and it is deep in our nature to do things together.
- Ward Cunningham

People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing -- as long as they are allowed to.
- Ward Cunningham

You are always taught to do as much as you can. Always put checks in. Always look for exceptions. Always handle the most general case. Always give the user the best advice. Always print a meaningful error message. Always this. Always that. You have so many things in the background that you're supposed to do, there's no room left to think. I say, forget all that and ask yourself, ""What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?""
I think the advice got turned into a command: ""Do the simplest thing that could possibly work."" That's a little more confusing, because there isn't this notion that as soon as you've done it, we'll evaluate it.
- Ward Cunningham

To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today. The place you leave in the code because you think you'll need it tomorrow, is actually a waste of time today — and a liability tomorrow. It does more harm than good.
- Ward Cunningham