Ward received his bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary engineering (electrical engineering and computer science) and his master's degree in computer science from Purdue University. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principal Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. He is founder of the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programs conference which it sponsors. Ward was part of the Smalltalk community. As of October 2005, he is the Director of Committer Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation. Ward is well-known for a few widely disseminated ideas which he originated and developed. Among these, the most famous are the wiki (originally wikiwiki), and many patterns in the field of software patterns, including the collection of patterns that later became known as "Extreme Programming" or "XP." His most famous quote is probably, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"