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 T...
Nov 24, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 B...
Nov 17, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Conwa...
Nov 03, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ho...
Oct 20, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 changi...
Oct 05, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 tackli...
Sep 22, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Sep 08, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 research...
Aug 25, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Aug 12, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 charac...
Jul 28, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jul 14, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jun 30, 2022•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jun 16, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jun 02, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 19, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 05, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Apr 21, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Apr 07, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Mar 23, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Many organizations regard code freezes as a way of reducing the risk of downtime during periods of peak demands. But associating outages with changes often masks a wider lack of faith in the deployment process — which is potentially where your focus should be. Here, our podcasters explore the negative impacts of code freezes and also the instances where code freezes can be beneficial.
Mar 10, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Feb 25, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 m...
Feb 10, 2022•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jan 27, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jan 13, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Dec 30, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Dec 16, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Dec 02, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Nov 18, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Nov 04, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Oct 21, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
