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.

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.