Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

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.