Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham, whose full name is Howard G. Cunningham, is an American computer programmer, born on 26 May 1949 in Michigan City, Indiana, who developed the first wiki. He began coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consulting firm on 25 March 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He co-authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, helped create software design patterns and extreme programming, invented the Framework for Integrated Test, and coined the concept of technical debt. With Kent Beck he contributed class-responsibility-collaboration cards. He earned his bachelor and master degrees at Purdue University, founded The Hillside Group, and worked at Tektronix, Wyatt Software, Microsoft, the Eclipse Foundation and New Relic. He co-wrote The Wiki Way with Bo Leuf and later created the Smallest Federated Wiki.