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.

Delivering innovation at scale

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.

The hard parts of software architecture

The last episode in this four-part series of the ABCD framework discusses how leaders can thrive in ambiguity through purpose-driven drive. With lessons from the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, this episode will help leaders translate drive into building resilient and high-performing teams.

ABCD Model for Leadership: Drive

A recent study shows there is a close correlation between technology proficiency and business growth. How does your organization’s level of digital proficiency compare to competitor brands in your market? How can you build technology as a culture into your organization at all levels? In this podcast, we discuss the advantages that lie in technology proficiency existing beyond the office of CIO and the impacts in business growth across regions.

Technology proficiency: the new imperative for business growth

With the advent of big data analytics, powered by the ease of moving data to the cloud, the pressure on companies to get data right to make million-dollar decisions in a few seconds has become paramount. How can organizations set themselves up for success when it comes to data? What are some of the foundational elements to have in place? In this episode, Jason Hare shares the principles of establishing a data governance plan for forward-thinking organizations.

Data governance: The foundation of data-driven organizations

Companies are looking to AI/ML to deliver better customer experience, improve productivity, or keep up with the competition. Beyond the popular use of replacing tedious and repetitive tasks with automation, Principal Consultant Jarno Kartela explains the more creative and strategic opportunities to solve business problems and improve product innovation. This episode is for modern decision-makers who want to become more data-enabled, data-informed and science-backed in their operations and strategic planning.

The value of creative AI

UNICEF USA implemented a technology strategy to create a consistent donor experience and put the supporter at the center of their operations. Their technology work meant that during a crisis like COVID, the nonprofit could quickly adapt their operations, workforce and donor relations. Andy Rhodes, CIO for UNICEF USA, shares details of their digital journey, how it has helped increase their social impact and tips for executives leading transformation efforts.

CIO Interview: A digital mission for social impact

Cloud infrastructure has been universally praised for its simplicity, an intuitive, scalable, and cost-effective alternative that promised to transform how we approach IT infrastructure. But as offerings from the major public cloud providers have become more sophisticated, cloud is becoming increasingly complex. Listen to this episode with Max Griffiths, Principal Infrastructure Consultant, to learn more about productizing this part of the business, preparing teams for the skills shift to this new paradigm, ensuring cost savings and enabling the business with product thinking.

Product thinking in the new era of cloud

In healthcare, powerful new data-based tools are revolutionizing the way we make decisions - putting individuals in charge of their own healthcare journeys and supporting the effective delivery of proactive and preventative care. What are the key trends that will help healthcare organizations shift from patient care to continuous wellbeing? In this podcast episode, Scott Davies, Tech Director, shares the trends and technologies that will augment healthcare experiences for patients and organizations.

Healthcare tech trends put the patient at the center

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.

Creating a developer platform for a networked-enabled organization

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.

Fluent Python revisited

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

The big five tech trends for 2022

A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler on the topic of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.

In Episode #1, they talk about our varying experiences with the flow of TDD, and the way TDD and self-testing code are often confused.

Is TDD Dead? Episode #1 - Testing and Confidence

Gary O'Brien and Barry O'Reilly presenting Lean Enterprise at ThoughtWorks Live Australia in May 2014.

Lean Enterprise - Gary O'Brien and Barry O'Reilly

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Podcast, Neal Ford explains to Johannes Thönes what architectural considerations can be derived from the DevOps movement. 

This episode is a quick introduction to what Microservices are, what kind of architectural principles can be used to implement them, what a good test strategy for microservices can can look like. We also explain why you should have a continuous delivery practice running before starting to develop Microservices.  

DevOps and Microservices: Architectural Considerations

In this episode, we talk about the role of a tech lead and how Pat Kua is helping new tech leads on their journey. We talk about the responsibilities of a tech lead and how this can be very overwhelming in the beginning. We also discuss the importance of a technical vision, what distinguishes a technical vision from an architecture and how we can teach tech visioning.

Every tech lead has his own style, so Pat tells me. So if you are new to the job, you will need to develop your own style. 

So, what should a participant in a tech lead program take out of it, I ask. Pat responds: “I would like to take the participants to say that they are comfortable [...] with the many responsibilities a tech lead has to deal with. I’m not expecting them to be experts in every skill.”

We close by talking about Pat’s Book “Talking with Tech Leads”, with interesting interviews from tech leads all over the industry.

Training Tech Leads

In this episode of the Tech Leaders Podcast, Vinod Sankaranarayanan, a program manager with ThoughtWorks, interviews colleague Sriram Narayan, who is an IT Management consultant and the author of a new book, Agile IT Organization Design. 

Sriram's book provides a basis for reviewing and reshaping the IT organization to equip it better for the digital age. Over the next 18 minutes, they explore IT reorganization from a structural angle. They discuss how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT.

Agile IT Organization Design with Sriram Narayan

Functional programming has a lot of concepts which have to be yet discovered by mainstream programming. One, known especially from the Haskell programming language, are Lenses. 

Johannes Thönes met Chris Ford, Software Developer and ThoughtWorker from London, during XConf in Hamburg where he gave a talk on implementing Lenses in Clojure. In this 23 minute interview, Johannes talks with Chris about his experience with Lenses in Clojure. First they define what a Lense is and what you would want to do with it. Then they talk about the specifics of implementing Lenses in a programming language introducing the terms Functor and Function. We close the episode by talking about the possibility to implement lenses in other programming languages such as Java 8 or JavaScript.


Lenses in Clojure

In this interview with ThoughtWorkers Tom Duckering and Pat Downey, we first introduce the threats coming out of the pipeline. We establish the continuous delivery pipeline as a production system because it will create what is in production. 

We also give an example on how easy it can be to get root access with an anonymous user - and of course we discuss strategies to make a pipeline secure enough for the attack trees a customer might face.

Securing the Pipeline with Tom Duckering and Pat Downey

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Tech Leaders Podcast, ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Author and Software Architect Neal Ford discuss the meaning of evolutionary architecture and how organizations can use it as a business advantage.

Neal explains, "When you introduce things like DevOps and continuous delivery, all of a sudden you change the level of granularity in which you can make changes in your architecture and that becomes a really huge enabler for being able to make decisions at a higher level..."

Rebecca adds, "What you need to do on Day One is think about what are the critical success factors for your architecture? Does it need to be highly available? Does it need to be highly scalable? Is security your major driving concern? Is it data loss? Those are all possible outcomes for architectures and all systems don't display the same kind of characteristics. That's what we mean when we're talking about evolutionary architecture."

Evolutionary Architecture with Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford

In this episode, Johannes Thönes, a ThoughtWorks developer based in Hamburg, interviews Lukasz Plotnicki, also a developer and ThoughtWorker, on the Backend for Frontend microservices pattern. Lukasz is the author of BFF @ SoundCloud, an article about the backend for frontends pattern which he looked into with Sam Newman at SoundCloud. This pattern describes the creation of one specific backend to provide functionality specifically to the need of a single client.

Johannes talks with Lukasz about the BFF pattern rooted in a Microservices environment. First, they explain the difference between UI fragment composition and the backend for frontends approach as two alternatives. Then they discuss how backend for frontends fit into a microservices architecture and how it can be structured organizationally. We close the episode by discussing how many backend for frontends are already out there.

BFF @ SoundCloud

One of the themes we highlighted in the April 2016 edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar was “open source as a virtuous byproduct.”

That’s a fairly high-minded phrase. In this 30-minute podcast, ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board Members Badri Janakiraman, Martin Fowler, Mike Mason and Rebecca Parsons discuss this theme and the general state of open source in the industry. The lively roundtable discussion touches on product development, security, technical culture, and machine learning as they relate to open source.

The podcast ends with a gentle reminder from Badri: "The availability of tools and source code out there does not mean that we take away the responsibility of development teams in organizations to have discipline and rigor in their development processes."

Check out the Technology Radar for more on the trends and technology that is shaping our future: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

More information

Open Source as a Virtuous Byproduct

In this 13-minutes long ThoughtWorks Beacon podcast, Neal Ford, a software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, shares his working definition of "evolutionary architecture."  

"Here is our working definition of evolutionary architecture," Neal says. "An evolutionary architecture supports incremental guided change as a first principle along multiple dimensions."

He also talks about the upcoming book on the topic he is co-authoring with ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Lead Developer and Agile Coach Patrick Kua. 

Stay tuned. You'll hear much more about this topic from Neal, Rebecca, and Pat as time goes on. 

More Info

Defining Evolutionary Architecture with Neal Ford

In this episode, we talk to ThoughtWorks developer Florian Sellmayr about LambdaCD, an open source library for building build pipelines as code, written in Clojure. Florian shares with us the problems he has faced with traditional continuous integration systems, for example Jenkins. He makes a passionate case for LambdaCD’s approach of building your pipelines like you build your microservices - using such powerful tools like a functional programming language, version control, tests and refactoring. Finally, Florian outlines how the project evolved from a thought experiment into a library under active use and development and gives hints for upcoming contributors that want to help in shaping LambdaCD’s future.  http://www.lambda.cd/

More info

Build Pipelines as Code with LambdaCD

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, ThoughtWorkers Jonny LeRoy and Chelsea Komlo talk about security and specifically how it fits into the development process of an agile team.

Jonny and Chelsea begin by talking about the "Security Sandwich" - a concept first coined in ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar. https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

"We called it the security sandwich because the meat of your delivery was in the middle, but then security came on either side like the two pieces of bread, " Jonny explained. "And there would be some upfront security planning and documentation, and then some penetration testing and certification at the end. We are really on a mission to work out how to bake security processes into continuous delivery approaches."

The podcast continues with Chelsea and Jonny providing next steps for tech leaders who want to incorporate a security culture within their respective teams.

"One thing that's important to remember is that you're never going to completely be 100% secure, but you also want to be able to know if something is happening and react. So when we think about security, we think about both hardening our systems and also reacting," Chelsea reminds listeners. 

You can follow us on Twitter @thoughtworks. For more information on ThoughtWorks and our podcast, visit www.thoughtworks.com. 


Incorporating Security Best Practices into Agile Teams

In this edition of the Beacon Podcast, Software Architect Neal Ford and CTO Rebecca Parsons go deeper into the definition of evolutionary architecture and discuss fitness functions. Learn more by visiting the Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Evolutionary Architecture  |  ThoughtWorks Beacon

In this edition of the Beacon podcast, ThoughtWorkers Neal Ford, Rachel Laycock and Jonny LeRoy discuss why and how to build your own tech radar. Learn more in this blog article: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/build-your-own-technology-radar or by visiting the Tech Radar https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Build Your Own Radar | ThoughtWorks Beacon

Much has been made of the benefits that tech such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can bring to the enterprise. But to be truly transformational, such tech can’t just bring a one-off improvement in decision making. They need to be able to adapt and change as the world around changes. Join ThoughtWorks’ global head of technology Mike Mason and his guests Christoph Windheuser, ThoughtWorks’ global lead in artificial intelligence  and Sheroy Marker, head of technology at ThoughtWorks Products, as they explore how to choose the the right data and AI model, to create complex models that are capable of continuously learning.

Continuous Intelligence

The Internet of Things promises radical change in how we interact with the world around — whether it’s coffee makers that turn on when our alarm clocks go off or using brain control to actuate objects. Join ThoughtWorks Principal consultant, Zhamak Dehghani and Principal Associate, Alexey Boas as they explore the practical implications of building IoT software and hardware with Software Developer, Charlie Gerard and Consultant Software Engineer Desiree Santos.

IoT hardware

The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar is the must-read report for anyone interested in state-of-the-art software development. In this episode, we take a behind-the-scenes look at how the Radar is built: how technologies get onto the Radar; the in-depth discussions over where they’re placed; and why some things miss out. 

Regular co-hosts Dr Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford are joined by Marco Valtas, Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks Brazil and Camilla Crispim, Lead Technologist and the Tech Assistant for the ThoughtWorks CTO.

How we build the Tech Radar

RESTful APIs quickly established themselves as useful architectural style for replatforming legacy systems with web-based ones. But increasingly, developers are running into the boundaries of deploying REST and API purity — confronting real world issues such as the rapid evolution of APIs for frontend layers where connectivity is patchy and where APIs should meet the changing visual representation and behavior of the frontend, where we increasingly see the adoption of alternatives such as GraphQL.

In this episode, co-hosts Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Brandon Byars, Market Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks North America and James Gregory, Tech Lead at ThoughtWorks Australia to explore the current state of API design and look at the impact of event-based architectures.

State of API design — REST and beyond

Platform thinking promises to give your business more bang for its technology investment buck, by putting your business priorities at the heart of your approach to delivery. But embracing platform thinking has profound implications for your technical architecture landscape.

Join our co-hosts Alexey Bôas and Zhamak Dehghani as they hear from Renan Martins and Luiz Ribeiro, both of whom are Lead Consultants based out of ThoughtWorks Brazil. They take an in-depth look at the practical realities of introducing platforms into organizations with legacy infrastructure and well-established development teams.

Delivering developer value through platform thinking

In today’s intensely competitive markets, most business leaders recognize the imperative to innovate. But that recognition doesn’t always lead to results. Many companies still struggle to deliver meaningful innovation — something that adds value to their customers.

Our regular podcast host Alexey Boas is joined by Swapnil Deshpande, Global Head of Product Innovation and Incubation at ThoughtWorks. Together they explore how to break down the barriers to innovation, using practical examples from ThoughtWorks’ internal TechOps incubator initiative.

Breaking down the barriers to innovation

Rebecca Parsons talks to Neal Ford and Mark Richards about their new book that promises to become the definitive guide to software architecture.

The book provides a concise overview on what's needed to become a software architect.

Fundamentals Of Software Architecture

The increased emphasis on machine learning in the enterprise also seen resurgent interest in Python. What makes Python different from other languages? What are the main features that make it unique? And where will Python go from here? In this episode, our podcasts chat to Luciano Ramalho, from ThoughtWorks Brazil — a renowned author of books on Python —  about dunder methods, fast fails and what’s new in the upcoming second edition of Fluent Python.

Future Of Python

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