Agitar Fellow Kent Beck Hailed by SYS-CON as i-Technology Hero

Kent Beck, Father of eXtreme Programming and Co-author of JUnit, Voted to All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes List

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., February 27, 2007 – Agitar Software, the leader in enterprise developer testing, today announced that Kent Beck was voted to SYS-CON’s All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes list. A worldwide team including editors, columnists, commentators, and readers voted to create SYS-CON’s All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes list. According to SYS-CON, the individuals on the list “conceived, created, built out, and maintained the Internet and indeed, before that, created modern computing as we know it today.”

Kent Beck was selected for creating JUnit, the most widely used testing framework for Java, and for his pioneering work on eXtreme Programming (XP). Kent Beck has been an Agitar Fellow since 2004, and collaborates on research initiatives in software testing with researchers at AgitarLabs, the focal point for internal research and advanced development for Agitar Software. Most recently, Kent has been collaborating with AgitarLabs on JUnit Factory (www.junitfactory.com) a free, experimental, web-based, JUnit generation service.

“The most neglected, and most promising, area for improving software quality and productivity is to get developers actively involved in unit testing their own code. However, that’s easier said than done; many developers still believe that testing is QA’s responsibility,” said Alberto Savoia, Agitar’s co-founder and CTO. “Fortunately, by inventing and promoting eXtreme Programming and by co-authoring JUnit, Kent Beck has made developer testing not only cool but also practical. For the first time in the history of software development, we can envision developer and unit testing becoming a standard practice rather than the exception. I cannot improve on Michael Feathers’ comment on JUnit: ‘Never in the field of software development was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code.’ We are thrilled to be working with Kent, especially in community and research projects like JUnit Factory.”

About Kent Beck - Agitar Fellow, Co-Creator of JUnit and Inventor of eXtreme Programming
Kent Beck is a recognized industry visionary and innovator in software development. He is the inventor of eXtreme Programming (XP), creator of JUnit - the most widely used testing framework for Java - and he is the author of seminal books about XP, JUnit, Test- Driven Development, and Patterns for Software Development.

About Agitar Software:
Agitar Software removes the obstacles to widespread adoption of unit testing. This practice, where software developers test their code as they write it, improves software quality and business agility. Agitar’s flagship product, AgitarOne, helps Java development teams start unit testing and makes good unit testing more effective, on both new code and legacy Java systems. Customers have shortened development cycles, cut defects handed over to system integration by 90 percent, and reduced the cost of fixing bugs after release by up to 90 percent. Agitar’s breakthrough technology, software agitation, has been honored with the Java One Duke’s Choice, Jolt Award, Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award, and InfoWorld Technology of the Year. Thousands of users at organizations such as Bank of America, Cisco, EDS, IBM Global Services, Northrop-Grumman, NTT Data, Siemens Medical, Tata Consultancy Services, and Tokyo Gas use Agitar’s products to improve in-house, offshore, or outsourced software development. Agitar is a privately-held company headquartered in Mountain View, CA. For more information visit www.agitar.com.

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Editorial Contact: Steve Eisenstadt
Page One PR for Agitar Software
Phone: 1-978-969-3010
Email: steve@pageonepr.com