Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

A few years ago, Thoughtworker and (prolific) author Neal Ford published Fundamentals of Software Architecture with Mark Richards. They're now back with another book on software architecture — written with co-author Raju Gandhi — which offers readers a very different learning experience. Described as a combination of technical book and graphic novel, Head First Software Architecture dispenses with dense prose to present and explain software architecture concepts and ideas in some highly innovative and novel ways.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, the authors — alongside their editor, Sarah Grey — join Rebecca Parsons to discuss their new book. They explain the thinking behind the approach, how it diverges from Fundamentals of Software Architecture and detail some of the challenges of writing in a new format.

Whether you're interested in getting started with software architecture or simply curious about technical communication and learning, listen to find out more.

Learn more about Head First Software Architecture: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/head-first-software/9781098134341/

Distributed systems are ubiquitous yet complex. They can be particularly demanding for software developers and architects tasked with dealing with the sometimes unpredictable nature of the interactions between their various parts.

That's why Thoughtworker Unmesh Joshi wrote Patterns of Distributed Systems. Published at the end of 2023, the book explores a number of patterns that characterize distributed systems, and uses them to not only help readers better understand how such systems work but also to solve problems and challenges that often arise.

On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Unmesh joins hosts Scott Shaw and Rebecca Parsons to talk about his book, explaining where the idea came from, how he put it together and why it's important to get beneath neat abstractions to really get to grips with the inner workings of distributed systems.

Learn more about Patterns of Distributed Systems: https://www.pearson.com/subject-catalog/p/patterns-of-distributed-systems/P200000011305/9780138221980

A few decades ago, it would have probably seemed strange to put software and automobility together. However, today software is embedded in all kinds of modern vehicles, enabling capabilities in everything from driving to passenger entertainment. But what exactly does this all mean for the automotive industry? And what demands does it place on design and manufacturing processes?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two Thoughtworks experts on software-defined vehicles — Michael Fait and Sriram J. — speak to Ashok Subramanian and Ken Mugrage about how the automotive industry has been changed by software. They cover everything from the implications software has for the way we think about design, manufacturing and regulation across the industry to the skills and practices developers need to work in this exciting space.

Is it really possible to measure the impact engineering teams have on a business' success? At a time when growth is challenging for many organizations and questions about productivity and effectiveness dominate industry conversations, getting it right is crucial. And although the DORA metrics are today well-established and extremely useful is it really enough? Do they actually help us tie the work we do to tangible business results? 

In attempting to answer these questions, a group of Thoughtworkers have developed what they call EEBO metrics. These are designed to measure engineering excellence to business outcomes. 

To discuss EEBO metrics, hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Scott Shaw (CTO, Thoughtworks APAC) are joined by Dinker Charak (Principal Product Strategist) and Sachin Dharmapurikar (Global Product Manager). Charak and Dharmapurikar helped to develop EEBO metrics; they believe it can be a valuable tool in aligning often complex engineering projects and activities with high-level business goals and objectives. Listen as they explain what EEBO metrics are (and aren't) and how businesses should think about using them.

Thanks to the pandemic, asynchronous working is, today, fairly common. However, it's often easily confused with simply working remotely — and while there are certainly neat synergies between the two, asynchronous working isn't just a description of your working arrangement: it's a set of intentional practices and artifacts that allow people to work together without having to physically be together.

On this episode of ther Technology Podcast, Thoughtworkers Sumeet Gayathri Moghe — author of The Async-First Playbook — and Maya Ormaza join hosts Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to offer their perspectives on asynchronous working. Taking in everything from the value of written communication, work that demands synchronicity and the importance of leadership to async working, listen to gain a fresh perspective on the way we work together in 2024.

Learn more about Sumeet's Async-First Playbook: https://www.asyncagile.org/the-book

Read Sumeet's guide to writing for async workers: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-writing

A guide to reading for asynchronous workers: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-reading

A guide to audio and visual content when working asynchronously: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-reading

With each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, we identify a number of key themes that we see as significant in the industry. In the most recent edition — volume 29, published in September — we picked out AI-assisted software development, the challenges of measuring productivity, the rapid growth of LLMs and remote delivery workarounds beginning to mature in a post-pandemic world.

For this, the final Technology Podcast episode of 2023, a few members of the team involved in putting the Technology Radar together — Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Scott Shaw and Erik Doernenberg — got together to discuss these themes in more detail and offer their perspectives. As we leave the year behind, it's a great way to review some of the key issues and stories that shaped the way the world builds software.

Generative AI has, unsurprisingly, been a major topic of conversation within Thoughtworks in 2023. However, as enjoyable as it is to get sucked into discussions about the reality, the risks and the benefits of this new technology, what's really interesting — and most important — is understanding how organizations can actually leverage generative AI in a way that's both safe and effective. 

For this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler spoke to Andreas Nauerz, CTO and Executive Vice President of Bosch Digital, who explained how he and his team have been thinking about generative AI and exploring the ways it can be leveraged across a huge multinational organization. He discusses where generative AI has already been effective, managing risk and the challenges of bring a large organization with you as you seek to implement something new.

It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems and tools for civil society initiatives, such as a chatbot that helps Indian citizens find information about government programs and schemes in their native language. Earlier this year, Jugalbandi caught the attention of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who saw it as evidence of AI's power to drive transformative change to every single part of the world.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Jugalbandi team members Vinod Sankaranarayanan and Prathamesh Kalamkar offer an inside look at the project, talking in detail about the work they've done, some of the challenges they've faced and how they're looking to expand and increase its impact in the months and years to come.

Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in software development.

In recent months, there's been a lot of talk in the industry around issues like whether AI might boost developer productivity and if it can be used for pair programming, but in this episode of the Technology Podcast we try to get beneath the hype to explore the reality of generative AI and software development — how is it actually being used today? What works? And what doesn't?

To dive deeper into all this, Chief of AI Mike Mason and Global Lead for AI-Assisted Software Delivery Birgitta Böckeler join hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Neal Ford, discussing everything from the current tooling to the way GenAI is shaping developer practices and workflows.

Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool — especially one that thousands of other developers use and depend on?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss their work on AppiumTestDistribution, an open source tool that supports test automation framework Appium. AppiumTestDistribution won a LambdaTest Delta Award at the August 2023 Testμ Conference.

Listen to Sekar and Krishna explain how the project emerged, how they approach maintaining and evolving the tool and what it takes to be a part of an award-winning open source project.

The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling developers. But what does it mean to actually build and maintain a platform? How can you ensure it actually supports the people that need it?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Chris Ford of Thoughtworks Spain and Aidan Donnelly, Director of Technology Platform at Personio, to discuss the importance of engineering platforms in organizations today.

Read Aidan's writing on Medium: https://medium.com/@aidan.donnelly

Many of the scale-ups we’ve partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we’ve seen are unexpected and dramatic rises in costs. In this episode we talk to members of our Digital Scale-up Studio, to hear their experience of gaining better visibility, improving operational efficiency at scale-ups, while the business maintains growth and gains greater knowledge of customer requirements.  

Podcast hosts: Rebecca Parsons, Premanand Chandrasekaran, 

Podcast guests: Stefania Stefansdottir, Sofia Tania

The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the data space. But how do they work together exactly? And what challenges can it pose?

Bharani Subramaniam and Madhu Podila discuss these issues and much more with hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons on the latest episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast.

Radio astronomy — a subfield of astronomy that studies the sky using radio frequencies — is data-intensive. That poses a challenge for radio astronomers: building and then communicating scientific insights requires significant processing and analytical work. Thoughtworks has been working with Dr. Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in India to develop solutions to these challenges, including a data processing pipeline, a collaborative platform for analysis and a digital catalog for publishing and communicating research.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast Dr. Gupta joins Justin Jose of Thoughtworks India's Engineering for Research (E4R) team as they speak to hosts Rebecca Parsons and Prem Chandrasekaran about their work together. Dr. Gupta explains the benefits of Thoughtworks work from an astronomer perspective, while Justin highlights the challenges of building software solutions in a highly specialized domain.

XR is a potentially transformative technology, but it needs to be leveraged in a way that drives value. That isn't straightforward — given effective XR initiatives often require significant experimentation and exploration, simply aligning XR with strict organizational goals and aims will often make it harder to achieve success. How can technologists and product leaders get the balance right?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Vaibhav Tikekar and Shea Clark-Tieche join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage to discuss how to use XR effectively, talking through their experiences working with clients in recent years and providing their perspectives on how experimentation and innovation can be brought in alignment with organizational goals and objectives.

Leadership is an important if often-overlooked quality in the technology industry. However, it is also a complex and multi-faceted thing: it isn't a discrete set of skills, but rather an ability to respond and adapt to the needs of a situation, team or individual.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ricardo Cavalcanti (Caval) and Arturo Santos from Thoughtworks Brazil join hosts Alexey Boas and Scott Shaw to discuss their experiences of leadership and offer their perspective on the value of building a diverse repertoire of leadership styles.

Design leader and Thoughtworks alumnus Emma Carter recently published her second book, DesignedUp. In it, she explains how designers can win a seat at the leadership table inside technolology organizations and become effective evangelists and advocates for good design principles and practices.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Emma joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss her new book and talks through some of the challenges designers face in even the most forward-thinking technology companies. She highlights that design is, today, far more than just UI design — it can, and should, touch many parts of an organization, ensuring that products and services are properly aligned with the aims, goals and needs of users.

You can find Emma's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/DesignedUp-Emma-Carter/dp/1032202017/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Thoughtworks recently established a new role — Chief AI Officer. Taking up the position is Mike Mason, a veteran of Thoughtworks with over 20 years at the company, in technology roles spanning developer to technology strategist and author (and occasional Technology Podcast host). Mike will help guide Thoughtworks AI strategy and ensure that we're equipped to support clients trying to leverage AI. 

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike talks with hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran about his new role and explains why it's important that the company has someone leading on AI. He also discusses the hype, opportunities and risks of generative AI that — high on everyone's agenda at the moment — and explores how it might change knowledge work in general and software engineering more specifically. Listen as Mike talks through some of his own experiments with ChatGPT and offers his perspective on its likely impact on jobs in the months and years to come.

It seems obvious to say that mobile usage has grown dramatically over the last decade, but for businesses that have to move to accomodate this type of user behavior, it presents many challenges. While some have successfully gone all-in on mobile experiences, for others, trying to build effectively for multiple channels is as much an organizational challenge as it is a product one.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Birgitta Böckeler are joined by Head of Technology Alexandra Lovin and Principal Mobile Consultant Andres Kievsky to discuss the current state of play in mobile development. They discuss the challenges of scaling mobile delivery, taking in everything from addressing privacy issues to application architecture.

A changing regulatory environment has made it more important than ever for organizations to embed privacy in their data infrastructure. Doing so, however, can be complicated — that means data scientists have an vital role to play in ensuring privacy is a key concern from both a technical and commercial perspective. 

Thoughtworker and data scientist Katharine Jarmul is eager to help fellow data scientists master privacy principles and techniques. Her new book, Practical Data Privacy, covers everything from the fundamentals of governance and anonymization through to advanced approaches to data privacy like federated learning and encrypted computation.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Katharine joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss the book and explain why data scientists need to be on the frontline in the fight for privacy. 

Find Practical Data Privacy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Data-Privacy-Enhancing-Security/dp/1098129466

When cloud first hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, its attraction was rooted, in part, in its apparent elegance and simplicity. As it has become an established norm in the industry, such simplicity has given way to more fragmentation and complexity. The growth of "multi-cloud" and adjacent terms such as "hybrid cloud" and "poly cloud" mean that cloud is a field that needs to be sensitively navigated by technology leaders and their organizations.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran discuss multi-cloud with Thoughtworks colleagues Rashmi Tambe and Sunit Parekh, who co-lead the Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud service line. In the episode they discuss terminology, the challenges of migrating to multiple cloud platforms, governance issues and some common antipatterns. They also offer advice for teams considering exploring the potential of multi-cloud.

Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabled by a significant technology modernization project which, amazingly, was completed just weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic erupted in March 2020, the start of a period in which millions of people took to Etsy to purchase cloth face masks. Without the modernized systems and infrastructure, Etsy would have struggled to cope with consumer demand.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason is joined by Etsy's Chief Architect Keyur Govande, the company's former CTO Mike Fisher and Thoughtworks North America Technical Director Tim Cochran to discuss how Etsy tackled the challenge of scaling to meet the needs of its expanding market. They talk through the technical challenges and the organizational focus required to scale in a way that was sustainable for the business yet impactful for Etsy's users.

Read Tim Cochran's article about evolving Etsy's culture on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-product-delivery-culture.html 

...And his piece on using the cloud to scale: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-cloud-scale.html

Learn more about Thoughtworks partnership with Etsy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/retail-ecommerce/etsy-scaling

When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most interesting innovations in machine learning right now is actually happening on a really small scale.

Thanks to TinyML, models can now be run on small devices at the edge of a network. This has significant implications for the future of many different fields, from automated vehicles to security and privacy.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Andy Nolan, Director of Emerging Technology at Thoughtworks Australia, and Matt Kelcey of Edge Impulse, to discuss what TinyML means for our understanding of machine learning as a discipline and how it could help drive innovation in the years to come.

We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverly deployed as a means of duping or manipulating us. However, trends like NFTs have brought this into clearer view. This is not to say it's a novel phenomenon — from dark patterns in UX design to pages and pages of end-user license agreements (EULAs), leveraging complexity for nefarious ends has long been an unsavory aspect of the technology industry.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Neal Ford are joined by Thoughtworks designer Kate Linton and Thoughtworks North America Head of Legal Jeremy Gordon to discuss what they describe as "the weaponization of complexity." Together, they grapple with the cynicism at the center of such activities and discuss some of the ways we can tackle it.

The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on the actual experiences of Thoughtworkers working with clients. With its first edition launched in January 2010, it is now a fixture of the Thoughtworks calendar, released twice a year in the spring and fall.

Although it has been around for more than a decade, we're well aware that people have lots of questions about it. One comes up more than others: how do you actually put it together? Giving a good, short answer is difficult — for those involved, it's a long process involving various stages of writing, debate and deliberation.

 However, with the next edition of the Radar — volume 28 — just weeks away, we wanted to give the world an insight into how we put Technology Radar together. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Marisa Hoenig, Perla Villareal and Camilla Crispim join host Neal Ford to discuss the work that goes into producing it and what the experience is like.

Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery Hackathon, an initiative designed to bring together expertise in fields ranging from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, machine learning and virology to discover new drugs that could help thwart the pandemic. 

One team that took part was from Thoughtworks India. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two of the members — Pooja Arora and Justin Jose — talk to Rebecca Parsons and Ashok Subramanian about a number of projects they worked on during the hackathon. Among other things, they explain how they used reinforcement learning to improve the efficacy of potential drugs in tackling what was, at the time, a virus that was only partially understood.

Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is today used in a diverse range of scenarios and architectures, it nevertheless remains a topic that causes considerable confusion and debate: where should we use it? How should we use it? Sometimes, what even is it, exactly?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by former Thoughtworker Mike Roberts — author of "the canonical book on serverless," Programming AWS Lambda — to discuss the current state of serverless. They examine the ways that serverless is understood today and explore the impacts and challenges it has for both businesses and software developers.

• Read Mike Roberts' book Programming AWS Lambda: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-aws-lambda/9781492041047/
• Read Mike's long-read on serverless on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and taught at the University of Central Florida. Becoming CTO in 2007, she has seen Thoughtworks — and the wider tech industry — evolve through a period in which the business mainstream has become increasingly comfortable with cutting-edge innovation.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler talk to Rebecca about her career, starting from Caterpillar warehouses in Peoria, Illinois, to being awarded the Technical Leadership Abie Award by AnitaB.org. It's the latest episode in our ongoing mini-series of Thoughtworker Journeys, offering an insight into the diverse and sometimes surprising experiences of technologists at Thoughtworks.

Learn more about AnitaB.org: https://anitab.org/

Read the new edition of Rebecca's book, Building Evolutionary Architectures: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/building-evolutionaryarchitectures-second-edition

As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and make delivering at speed much more challenging than it was previously.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons is joined by colleagues Rick Kick (Head of Application and Platform Transformation in the Enterprise Modernization team for Thoughtworks North America) and Kennedy Collins (Head of Product and Design for the North America Central Market), alongside Anthony Maitz of Pariveda, to discuss how to manage the various frictions and tensions that can emerge as organizations scale. They cover a wide range of tactics and strategies to improve alignment between product and engineering, and offer an insight into what can actually be done to address a common scale-up growing pain.

Read Rick and Kennedy's article discussed in the episode: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03-product-v-engineering.html

It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends — and understanding what they mean — matters. At Thoughtworks we do that with our Looking Glass report. Our most recent edition was published at the end of 2022; it provides a useful framework for thinking through the major shifts that look set to happen across the industry in 2023. 

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, regular hosts Mike Mason and Ken Mugrage take the guest seats to talk to Neal Ford about the six key trends in the latest Looking Glass. They explain why they were chosen before diving deeper into a selection of some of the most hotly debated trends that feature in the report, such as metaverse and Web3.

• Explore the latest Looking Glass: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/looking-glass
• Read Mike Mason's metaverse article (co-written with Barton Friedland) https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/metaverse-practical-review

Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering, thanks to the rise of cloud and highly complex distributed systems.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Alexey Boas and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Prem Chandrasekaran and  Karthik Krishnan — authors of the new book Domain-Driven Design with Java — to discuss DDD and how it has developed over the last 20 years. They explore how DDD can help us respond to complexity and talk about the perspectives they put forward in their book.

The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's important, it nevertheless remains something that is all too often overlooked or viewed as a luxury when it comes to actually building products. This is unfortunate: taking accessibility seriously throughout the process of development and design will not only help foster a more equitable industry, it will also lead to better products for everyone.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Scott Shaw and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by Kate Linton and Katie Peterson to discuss the importance of shifting accessibility left — making it a first-order concern that's part of the earliest stage of the product development lifecycle. They explore why many companies are failing on accessibility, how it can be done properly and the wider benefits of such a shift.

Data Mesh is one of the most powerful and widely-discussed concepts to emerge from Thoughtworks in recent years. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the risks and challenges data can pose — from the perspective of both privacy and organizational effectiveness — it has only become more relevant.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Zhamak Dehghani (Thoughtworks alumnus and author of O'Reilly's Data Mesh: Delivering Data Driven Value at Scale) and Emily Gorcenski join Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss Data Mesh's place in the industry today, more than three years on from the first time we discussed the topic on the podcast. Together they explore some of the challenges organizations face when adopting it and what its future looks like, as it continues to push the world to rethink data centralization.

Low-code and no-code development platforms have been heralded in recent years as a solution to engineering talent gaps and as a trend that will properly democratize technology, allowing even non-coders to build applications from scratch. However, despite the marketing rhetoric, such platforms pose considerable challenges: how do they fit alongside existing development projects? To what extent do they enable or restrict our ability to build the kinds of software we want and need? 

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Mike Mason are joined by Scott Shaw and Xu Hao to discuss the state of play in the world of low-code and no-code. They explore the different types of platforms that have emerged in the space and ask what organizations need to consider before they invest time, energy and money in integrating them.

For many who have been part of the recent migration of users from Twitter to Mastodon, their first encounters with the "fediverse" have been puzzling, even disorienting. Given a decade in which we've all grown accustomed to the affordances of corporate social media, it's not surprising people have questions: How does it work, exactly? How am I supposed to use it? 

With so much current interest in the platform — and the wider ecosystem of which it is a part — in this special bonus episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler digs into the technology and culture of Mastodon with the help of Effy Elden, Moritz Heiber and Julien Deswaef, three Thoughtworkers that have been long-time residents of the fediverse. They discuss how Mastodon works, how it sits within the broader decentralized social media landscape and whether this move to Mastodon marks the start of a new chapter in how the world views social media.

Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the concept of “evolutionary architecture” and demonstrated how it can help organizations manage change effectively in fast-moving business contexts and an ever-shifting technology landscape.

The book has now been updated, with its second edition due to be published in December 2022. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca and Neal talk to Birgitta Böckeler and Scott Shaw about the new edition and discuss how seeing various applications of evolutionary architecture over the last five years has led them to identify new issues and challenges. In particular, they talk about how the new edition takes up the question of automating architectural governance using fitness functions, and what this means for the way we build and maintain complex software systems.

While putting together this year's Technology Radar, Conway's Law — the idea that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their communication structures — was the subject of a lot of discussion. Should we fight it — by deploying the inverse conway maneuver? Or do we need to adopt a more nuanced approach and consider how we can leverage it?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Martin Fowler and James Lewis join hosts Birgitta Böckeler and Mike Mason to delve into Conway's Law. They explore what Conway's Law means for organizations today, how it should — and should not — be applied and why everyone working in and around software systems needs to pay close attention to it.

Read the 1968 paper (by Melvin Conway) that identified the phenomenon.

The “Basal Cost” of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama. The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to maintain normal functioning. Applied to software development, the concept is intended to help us pay much more attention to the long term costs — like additional complexity and maintenance — of building a new feature.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, James Lewis and Georgina Giannoukou join hosts Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss the Basal Cost of software and explore how it can help organizations and software development teams better manage product and system complexity.

Although many books have been written on software testing over the years, Gayathri Mohan's Full-Stack Testing, released earlier this year with O'Reilly, is unique: by taking a comprehensive look at many different aspects of testing across the development lifecycle, it emphasizes the importance of a truly holistic approach. 

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Gayathri joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage to discuss the book, her experience as a QA and testing's important and changing role in the future of software development.

Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific, dependent on the challenges and goals of an organization. 

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Tim Cochran and Ajey Gore join Rebecca Parsons to discuss technical debt in startups and scale-ups. Taking in the causes of technical debt in both types of organizations, the various ways it can manifest itself, and approaches and practices for tackling it, the episode dives deep into Tim and Ajey’s experiences leading technology and engineering teams around the world. 

Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future can obscure the reality of what engineers and organizations are doing today.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Scott Shaw and Birgitta Boeckeler are joined by Cam Jackson and Kuldeep Singh to discuss the XR work Thoughtworks has been doing with clients. Together they explore what it means for engineers and how the future of the technology might evolve.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that epidemiology is incredibly complex: the millions of edge cases, what-ifs, and counterfactuals make modelling exceptionally difficult. One way of tackling this complexity is through agent-based modelling.

In this episode, Rebecca Parsons and Premanand Chandrasekaran are joined by Thoughtworks colleague Jayanta Kshirsagar and Gautam Menom, professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University. They discuss how Thoughtworks has been helping researchers in India using agent-based modelling with two custom-built tools: EpiRust and BharatSim.

Given the variety of architectural styles — and the unique technology landscapes at every organization — how can you develop a set of metrics that can reliably guide your organization to improve? Andrew Harmel-Law has been grappling with this question for some time. We catch up with him to hear how he thinks DORA’s Four Key Metrics provide invaluable guardrails that can empower teams and improve the software delivery process.

Thoughtworks regularly emphasises the importance of culture in building and maintaining high-quality software when working with clients. So, for episode 100 of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, we wanted to reflect on how the organization — and its leaders — has gone about trying to build a culture of innovation over the last couple of decades. Featuring CTO Rebecca Parsons and Chief Strategy Officer Chad Wathington, this episode offers an insight into some the successes, failures, and characters that have shaped Thoughtworks over the years.

The idea of best practices is becoming an anachronism — given today’s complex technology landscape, the notion that there can be a single best way of doing anything seems fanciful. Our crew explore the thinking behind sensible defaults: that there may be some practices which act as de facto starting points on any given project because they’re effective — practices such as pair programming, TDD or continuous integration. But context is vital and there may be circumstances which makes the default choice invalid — or at least suboptimal.

Mutation testing has long been a proven method for driving software quality in a way unit testing can't. But it can be a long, expensive and computationally intensive process. Our podcasters explore effective strategies for mutation testing and how to establish when it's right for your projects.

In the second part of our exploration of legacy displacement, we look at the practicalities of making upgrades work, from strategies for decomposing huge monoliths into manageable chunks as well as the methods for delivering those parts now that you've broken your monolith up. 

Updating legacy systems has been a common feature of enterprise IT. But — strangler-fig pattern aside — there’s little written about how to do it effectively. We explore the ideas of legacy replacement — and even legacy displacement — with a group of colleagues that are writing an article series on the topic for martinfowler.com. In the first episode of this two-part series, we look how they’ve come up with patterns for legacy displacement.

We’re all subject to cognitive biases. And whether we’re aware of them or not, they can have a profound impact on the code we write — especially when working in an agile environment, where we have to constantly deal with uncertainties. We take a deep dive into where our biases emerge, the impacts they can have and how we can mitigate them to improve the quality of our code.

From extreme programming to pairing with Ward Cunningham and the earliest days of .Net to building communities in a remote-first world, Thoughtworks’ CEO Guo Xiao has seen huge changes in the tech industry. We hear how he went from being a graduate developer to leading a company of more than 10,000 — and what he’s learned about developing software along the way.

We catch up with Dave Farley to hear about the genesis of his blockbuster book, Continuous Delivery — which he authored with Jez Humble — as well as his latest tome, Modern Software Engineering. He shares his ideas about the art of software development and common misconceptions about the principles of engineering.

There are a handful of common problems organizations encounter on their journey as a scale-up, where some of the practices that enabled them to flourish as a start-up produce a level of technical debt that threatens to impede future growth. In this episode, we explore how to tackle some of those bottlenecks.

From pair programming to the daily standup, the global pandemic challenged how we think about the practices and rituals that were a daily part of developers’ lives. Our podcasters explore what changes were enforced, how it impacted teams — and whether any of those changes will stick in the new normal.

A multicloud strategy, where you have a business-critical application that’s engineered to run across multiple cloud platforms, can be appealing for a number of reasons, including reliability, regulatory and risk. But, like most architectural decisions, there are trade offs. Here our podcast team explore the intricacies of multicloud and the implications of making that journey.

Through the adoption of DevOp practices, we’ve all become accustomed to product teams having full control over their continuous delivery pipelines right the way through to production. When organizations start out with homogenous sets of product teams, all doing similar things, compliance can fit in pretty readily. But issues arise as the scale grows and teams want to do validation checks in different ways. Our podcasts explore the ideas of compliance as a product, which aims to make compliance more manageable at scale.

Each year, Thoughtworks's Looking Glass report explores the technology trends we think will have far-reaching consequences. We catch up with one of the report's authors, to hear more about what the future holds for enterprise technology.

Ahead of the release of the second edition of his landmark book, Fluent Python, our team catch up with author Luciano Ramalho to hear about what’s happening in the world of Python — and why it’s popularity continues to endure.

At Thoughtworks, our internal Techops team created a self-service developer platform — NEO — with the goal of slashing the time it takes for developers to build digital products within the company. We catch up with Swapnil Deshpande and Prakash Subramaniam about designing a platform that can deliver what developers need in an easy and intuitive manner — and deliver business value.

Lean inceptions combine design thinking and methodologies from the Lean startup movement to provide teams with ways to get started on their projects and identify a minimum viable product as part of building an amazing business solution. We catch up with Paolo Caroli to hear about his new book on the subject as he share a few tips along the way.

Following on from our earlier episode on the Software Architecture: the hard parts, we’re joined by the other two co-authors of that book to explore issues around data architecture and how that fits into these broader concepts of architecture. We discuss how it is that what looks like a software decision is frequently influenced by data.

Things have come a long way since Kent Beck first wrote about test-driven development 20+ years ago: the languages we use, our deployment environments and the rise of low-code tools. Former Thoughtworker Saleem Siddiqui has just written a new book on TDD and joins our podcast team to discuss why this book — and subject — is more pertinent than ever.

There’s often debate around the build-versus-buy decision for digital capabilities. But when it comes to integrating disparate systems, the convenience of some modern integration tools can result in point-in-time integrations: ones that are never intended to evolve, with all the complexity and cost that entails. Here, we catch up with Brandon Byers to explore the limits of low-code tools and the perils of thinking you can buy integration.

In the past decade, NoSQL has gone from being an interesting experiment to becoming business critical. We catch up with Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage, co-authors of NoSQL Distilled, to understand why the database technology took off and where it’s proven its capabilities in the enterprise and how thinking around issues such as persistence models has evolved.

In today’s modern distributed systems are by their very nature complex. The decisions you need to make — around the wiring of your services, what size should the services be, and how should they call one another — are uniquely complex. In Software Architecture: the hard parts, the authors explore the rough edges of software architecture and look at how you can effectively do trade analyses that work for you. We catch up with two of the book’s co-authors.

From creating novel solutions for parking airplanes or identifying the winning formula for single malt whiskeys, our colleagues at Fourkind have extensive experience in building machine learning systems. Here, Max Pagels and Jarno Kartela highlight why deploying ML is different, how edge cases can confound well-trained models and the unexpected areas where ML can deliver better than human-levels of performance.

Lean Enterprise was a landmark book, exploring how large enterprise could learn from start-ups and deliver innovation at scale — how they could respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products. Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with two of the book’s authors to hear about its genesis, its impact and why there’s not likely to be a second edition.

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with retired Thoughtworker and co-signatory of the Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith. He talks us through his experiences, from working on the Apollo missions to dropped card desks, the birth of the agile movement and its future in a post-pandemic world.

As the infamous SolarWinds attack showed, it’s no longer sufficient to just write secure code, you need to ensure that you understand the security risks throughout your entire software supply chain: whether that’s compilers, containers or the tools used to manage deployment pipelines. 

Retrospectives can play a vital role in enabling teams to improve continuously. Here, our podcast team is joined by Paulo Caroli, author of Fun Retrospectives to get insights into delivering sessions that energize and inform the whole team — while ensuring they become increasingly effective at meeting their goals.

In today’s cloud-first world, distributed systems are everywhere. Unmesh Joshi gives an insight into his work looking at distributed systems — from distributed databases such as Cassandra to messaging brokers such as Kafka or infrastructure components such as Docker — the common problems that arise and the approaches to solving these problems, which he categorizes as patterns.

Pramod Sadalage co-authored the book Refactoring Databases 15 years ago. The concepts remain hugely relevant today for those exploring microservices. We caught up with Pramod and Martin Fowler to hear about the genesis of the book and explore how the principles of refactoring work in a world of NoSQL databases.

There’s often lots of talk about how companies can make their developers more productive. But it may be more useful to think about developer effectiveness: how to ensure they’re building the most useful products for their customers. This isn’t about working longer or harder or hiring smarter people, it's just working smarter, using your time better and making sure that the company is providing that environment that allows developers to be effective. Our special guests from Spotify and Etsy give us their unique perspectives.

We catch up with the two co-authors of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow to hear about their ideas on enabling enterprises to become more effective at software delivery — and the influence of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load and responsive organization evolution.

Following on from our Earth Day episode on green software engineering, we turn to the concept of Green Cloud. Reducing your IT operations’ carbon footprint is more complex than simply moving to the cloud. We explore how developers can gain insights into the energy usage of their cloud operations and the tools and techniques they can deploy to minimize their cloud-related emissions.

There’s increasing awareness of tech’s carbon footprint but to what extent can software developers help? Is it possible to measure the energy efficiency of your code? Can you write code that saves energy? Our podcast team unpick the art of the possible when it comes to green software engineering.

We talk to two of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto for Software Development — Jim Highsmith and Martin Fowler — to get their perspective on how the agile movement has evolved over the past two decades.

The skill set needed to effectively step up to a tech lead role can be markedly different from the ones you gain as an engineer. That realization is what prompted our former colleague Pat Kua to write his book Talking with Tech Leads. Here, he shares his experiences of how to successfully navigate the journey towards becoming a tech lead.

Our employee No. 1 talks through her experiences of winning over agile skeptics, pair programming refuseniks and TDD doubters, along with her account of the winnebago come mobile computing lab otherwise known as the mythical Thought Mobile. Neal Ford and Alexey Boas join Patricia Mandarino to hear about her ThoughtWorks journey.

Our team catches up with Kief Morris to hear about the release of his updated book on infrastructure as code. They explore how tools, practices and patterns from software engineering can be applied to managing infrastructure — and how IaC has evolved in the years since Kief wrote the first volume.