Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

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 you were seeking in the first place.

In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Neal Ford and Mark Richards — authors of multiple books on software architecture — to discuss service granularity. They explain why it matters and how software architects can go about getting it right, through the lens of granularity integrators and disintegrators.

Learn more about Neal and Mark's 2021 book Software Architecture: The Hard Parts (co-authored with Zhamak Dehghaniand Pramod Sadalage): https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/software-architecture-hard-parts

Find out more about Neal and Mark's second edition of The Fundamentals of Software Architecture, set to be released in early 2025: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098175504/

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 developed alongside Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey and Michaela Greiler.

Taking in everything from the origins of the DevEx framework in SPACE metrics, to how technologists can better 'sell' the importance of developer experience to business stakeholders, listen for a fresh perspective on a topic that's likely to remain at the top of the industry's agenda for the forseeable future.

Read the DevEx Framework paper: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878

Read Abi's article (co-authored with Tim Cochran) on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/measuring-developer-productivity-humans.html

Listen to Abi's Engineering Enablement podcast: https://getdx.com/podcast/

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 might be able to support designers. They discuss what AI tools could help the design process, how these tools could fit neatly into current practices and what the emergence of this technology could mean for design practices more broadly. 

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 think through their own approach to technology decision-making, something which is becoming increasingly challenging in a rapidly changing and complex world.

So, to discuss sensible defaults and explain precisely why we want to share them with the world, hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage are joined by Brandon Cook and Kief Morris, two Thoughtworkers that played an important role in putting our sensible defaults together. They discuss the origins of the sensible default idea, some examples, as well as the challenges of putting them into practice.

Explore Thoughtworks' sensible defaults: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/topic/sensible-defaults

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 software developers' experiences.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Camilla Crispim and Renan Martins talk to hosts Alexey Boas and Ken Mugrage about the value of a Tech Dash and explain how it can help track technology use. They also discuss where the idea came from and how they put it into practice across Thoughtworks Brazil.

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 continues to have a leading role in the project as a member of its Governing Committee.

To tell Bahmni’s unique story, Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage speak with Satish Viswanathan and Angshuman Sarkar, two Thoughtworkers actively participating and contributing to the project. They discuss Bahmni’s origins and how it grew from a small, local tool to become a vital component in healthcare infrastructure in parts of the world that have long faced resource challenges.

Learn more about Bahmni: https://www.bahmni.org/

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, Thoughtworks alumnus Diana Adorno and current Thoughtworkers Lisa Junger and Robin Doherty speak to host Alexey Boas about a security maturity model they've developed that was recognized by the prestigious CSO50 Awards. They explain the purpose of developing and using one, how theirs works and why it should matter to any organization that wants to get serious about the way it does security.

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 is context-dependent, but what does that actually mean in practice?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ken Mugrage and Valentina Servile debate the merits of both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Talking with hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Birgitta Böckeler, they offer their perspectives on when and where both should be used — in making the case for their chosen approaches, they shed some much needed light on a discussion that every software engineering team should have.

Learn more about Valentina Servile's book Continuous Deployment: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/continuous-deployment

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 for software developers — and other technologists — working today.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler and Erik Dörnenberg join Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to discuss the themes for Technology Radar Vol.30. They explain what they mean, why they were picked and what their implications are for the wider industry.

Explore volume 30 of the Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

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 exceptional machine learning-backed products.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, the authors join Scott Shaw and Ken Mugrage to discuss their book. They explain how it addresses current issues in the field, taking in everything from the technical challenges of testing and deployment to the cultural work of building teams that span different disciplines and areas of expertise.

Learn more about Effective Machine Learning Teams: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/effective-machine-learning-teams

Read a Q&A with the authors: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/author-q-and-a-effective-machine-learning-teams