Matt Stephens

Who is Matt Stephens?

Matt Stephens is an author and software process expert based in London, UK. In January 2010 he founded independent book publisher Fingerpress UK Ltd.

He is known for having spoken out against what he regards as popular software development fashions, most notably Extreme Programming, Enterprise JavaBeans and the Ruby programming language. He has co-authored four books on software development: Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder, Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice, Agile Development with ICONIX Process, and Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP. He is also a columnist for The Register, a UK-based IT news website where he writes a monthly "Agile Iconoclast" column on software design and programming, and has written for Dr Dobb's Journal, Software Development Magazine, Application Development Trends and other journals and websites.

Stephens' first book, Extreme Programming Refactored, has proved to be controversial as it satirizes the popular Extreme Programming agile methodology. The book triggered a lengthy debate in articles, internet newsgroups, and web-site chat areas. The core argument of the book is that XP is fragile rather than agile, as its practices are interdependent but that few practical organizations are willing/able to adopt all the practices; therefore the entire process fails. On the book's first page he points out that he is not "anti-agile", rather that the XP process is a fragile implementation of the values described in the Agile Manifesto.