It's widely accepted that, in most cases at least, software systems should be modular, consisting of separate, discrete services. But what about the size of those services? How big or small should they be? This is where the question of service granularity comes in: too small and your system will become needlessly complicated; too big and you lose all the benefits of modularity we were seeking in the first place. In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is...

Trying to measure developer effectiveness or productivity isn't a new problem. However, with the rise of fields like platform engineering and a new wave of potential opportunities from generative AI, the issue has come into greater focus in recent years.  In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Prem Chandrasekaran speak to Abi Noda, CEO of software engineering intelligence platform DX, about measuring developer experience using the DevEx Framework — which Abi...

Artificial intelligence has been presented as a technology with the potential to transform many different fields and professions. One of the most notable is design — but if we want to design in a way that's truly human-centric and inclusive, to what extent can artificial intelligence really help us do better work? In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Rebecca Parsons and Lilly Ryan speak to Thoughtworks design leaders Kate Linton and Esther Tham to get their perspective on how AI...

If you work in technology, you're constantly making decisions: not just what you should do, but also how you should do it. That's why we developed the concept of "sensible defaults" — practices and technology decisions that we generally see — in most scenarios — as the right way to do things.  Although we've been talking about sensible defaults internally for a few years now, we recently decided to share them publicly on our website. We did so because we believe it can help organizations...

Understanding your technology estate and how it's being leveraged is critical for organizations; it impacts everything from financial planning to capability development. But given the rapid pace of change — even inside a single company, let alone the wider industry — how can this be done effectively? One approach we've landed on at Thoughtworks is something called a Tech Dash: it's a method of internal research that surfaces information about an organization's technology use, and even...

Bahmni started life as an open-source hospital information management system and electronic medical record for a single hospital in rural India. Today, it has more than 500 implementations in 50 countries across Africa and Asia, and is recognized as one of only 165 digital public goods by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.  Thoughtworks played a key part in bringing Bahmni into the world back in 2012. And although today it’s run and supported by a coalition of organizations, Thoughtworks...

One of the fundamentals of security is self-awareness: knowing where you may be vulnerable, the practices and processes that aren't yet quite in place and what actions you need to prioritize are essential if your organization is to excel at security. But how can that be done? In complex and distributed teams, surfacing such knowledge can be incredibly difficult. One solution, though, is something called a security maturity model. In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast,...

Despite occasional confusion, the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is simple: should deploying to production be on demand or every good build? Answering which approach is 'best' is difficult; any attempt at dogmatism is likely to just look foolish, given it is, like many other debates in software development, context-dependent. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and unpick the issues at the heart of the discussion. It's all well and good saying the debate...

Volume 30 of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar was published in April 2024. Alongside 105 blips, the edition also featured four themes selected by the team of technologists that puts the Radar together. They were: open-ish source licenses, AI-assisted software development teams, emerging architecture patterns for LLMs and dragging pull requests closer to continuous integration. Each one cuts across the technologies and techniques included on the Radar and highlights a key issue or challenge...

Bringing machine learning models into production is challenging. This is why, as demand for machine learning capabilities in products and services increases, new kinds of teams and new ways of working are emerging to bridge the gap between data science and software engineering. Effective Machine Learning Teams — written by Thoughtworkers David Tan, Ada Leung and Dave Colls — was created to help practitioners get to grips with these challenges and master everything needed to deliver...

Can AI improve the quality of our code? A recent white paper published by code analysis company CodeScene — "Refactoring vs. Refuctoring: Advancing the state of AI-automated code improvements" — highlighted some significant challenges: in tests, AI solutions only delivered functionally correct refactorings 37% of the time. However, there are nevertheless opportunities. The white paper suggests it might be possible to dramatically boost the success rate of AI refactoring to 90%. In this...

If you've ever wondered how to measure your cloud carbon footprint, you can — thanks to a tool that's called, somewhat unsurprisingly, Cloud Carbon Footprint. Launched in March 2021 by Thoughtworks as an open-source project, it allows users to monitor and measure carbon emissions and energy use from cloud services. On this episode of the Technology Podcast, senior software engineers Cameron Casher and Arik Smith join Alexey Boas and Ken Mugrage to talk about Cloud Carbon Footprint in depth....

Looking Glass isn't like most other technology trend reports. It doesn't just tell you what deserves your attention, it's designed to help you use it to focus on what really matters to you. Published once a year, Thoughtworks intends it to be a tool that helps readers make sense of the emerging technologies that are going to shape the industry in the months and years to come. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, lead Looking Glass contributors Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage trade...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...