p. 7
“

When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

— Kent Beck

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature." in the context of "p. 7" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Kent Beck" (Quotes, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999: Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts (1999) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley. ) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Kent Beck

About Kent Beck

Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies, also named agile software development. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001.