Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

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.