Martin Fowler

MARCH 26, 2024

Mainframe systems continue to run much of the world's computing workload, but it's often difficult to add new features to support growing business needs. Furthermore the architectural challenges that make them slow to enhance also make them hard to replace. To reduce the risk involved, we use an incremental approach to legacy displacement, gradually replacing legacy capabilities with implementations in modern technology.

Architecture 302

Architecture System Strategy Technology 302

Martin Fowler

MARCH 19, 2024

Abi Noda and Tim Cochran complete their article on qualitative metrics by outlining how to capture them effectively. They discuss the mental steps that people go through as they respond to a survey and provide a template to get started when assessing developer experience. A final section looks at how qualitative and quantitative work together: often by starting with qualitative metrics to establish baselines and determine where to focus, followed with quantitative metrics to drill deeper into sp

Metrics 190

Metrics How To Survey Development 190

Martin Fowler

MARCH 15, 2024

From time to time people ask me for a copy of the code I used in the opening chapter of Refactoring , so they can follow along themselves. I had Reasons for not providing this code, specifically laziness. Fortunately Emily Bache is more dedicated, and she has set up a github repository - the Theatrical Players Refactoring Kata - with the code, and enough tests to make it reasonable to do the refactoring.

Video 174

Video Testing 174

Martin Fowler

MARCH 13, 2024

Abi Noda and Tim Cochran continue their discussion on using qualitative metrics to assess the productivity of development teams. In this installment they classify qualitative metrics into attitudinal and behavioral metrics. We also see that qualitative metrics allow you to measure things that are otherwise unmeasurable, provide missing visibility, and supply necessary context for quantitative data.

Metrics 186

Metrics Data Development 186

Martin Fowler

MARCH 12, 2024

Measuring developer productivity is a difficult challenge. Conventional metrics focused on development cycle time and throughput are limited, and there aren't obvious answers for where else to turn. Qualitative metrics offer a powerful way to measure and understand developer productivity using data derived from developers themselves. Abi Noda and Tim Cochran begin their discussion by explaining what a qualitative metric is and why we shouldn't reject them for being subjective or unreliable.

Development 298

Development Metrics Data 298

Martin Fowler

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Improvements in communications technology have led an increasing number of teams that work in a Remote-First style, a trend that was boosted by the forced isolation of Covid-19 pandemic. But a team that operates remotely still benefits from face-to-face gatherings, and should do them every few months. Remote-first teams have everyone in a separate location, communicating entirely by email, chat, video and other communication tools.

Travel 151

Travel Video Hotels System Architecture 151

Martin Fowler

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

LLM engineering involves much more than just prompt design or prompt engineering. Here David Tan and Jessie Wang reflect on how regular engineering practices such as testing and refactoring helped them deliver a prototype LLM application rapidly and reliably.

Artificial Inteligence 277

Artificial Inteligence Engineering Applications Development 277

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 25, 2024

I’ve been using Emacs for many years, using it for any writing for my website, writing my books, and most of my programming. (Exceptions have been IntellJ IDEA for Java and RStudio for R.) As such I’ve been happy to see a lot of activity in the last few years to improve Emacs’s capabilities, making it feel rather less than a evolutionary dead end. One of the biggest improvements to my Emacs experience is using regexs for completion lists.

Tools 138

Tools Virtualization Programming Company 138

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 24, 2024

Tim and Premand begin their discussion of how to get out of the difficulties of onboarding by explaining how to create a path to effectiveness for new hires. Such a path outlines the needs of employee and how the onboarding process should fulfill them.

How To 199

How To 199

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 23, 2024

The last year has been a hard one for the technology industry, which faced its greatest waves of cutbacks and layoffs since the dotcom crash at the beginning of the century. As 2024 begins, we're seeing the early signs of a turn-around, which hopefully means technology organizations will soon be thinking of hiring again. Should such happy days return, firms will again run into the common problem of taking too long for new hires to become effective.

Industry 294

Industry Organization Technology 294

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 18, 2024

At the turn of the century, I was lucky to involved in several projects that developed the practice of Continuous Integration. I wrote up our lessons from this work in article on my website, where it continues to be a oft-referenced resource for this important practice. Late last year a colleague contacted me to say that the article, now nearly twenty years old, was still useful, but was showing its age.

Continuous Integration 363

Continuous Integration Resources Industry Development 363

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 4, 2024

When working with a legacy system it is valuable to identify and create seams: places where we can alter the behavior of the system without editing source code. Once we've found a seam, we can use it to break dependencies to simplify testing, insert probes to gain observability, and redirect program flow to new modules as part of legacy displacement.

Test-Driven Development 187

Test-Driven Development Testing System Software 187

Martin Fowler

JANUARY 2, 2024

Another year, another time to pick six favorite musical discoveries. 2023 includes ambient bluegrass, Afro-Andean funk, Northumbrian smallpipes, dancing kora, and Ukrainian folk jazz.

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138

Martin Fowler

DECEMBER 12, 2023

Throughout my career, people have compared software development to “traditional” engineering, usually in a way to scold software developers for not doing a proper job. As someone who got his degree in Electronic Engineering, this resonated with me early in my career. But this way of thinking is flawed because most people have the wrong impression of how engineering works in practice.

Software Development 147

Software Development Software Engineering Engineering Software 147

Martin Fowler

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a technique for building software that guides software development by writing tests. It was developed by Kent Beck in the late 1990's as part of Extreme Programming. In essence we follow three simple steps repeatedly: Write a test for the next bit of functionality you want to add. Write the functional code until the test passes.

Software Review 260

Software Review TDD Test-Driven Development Testing 260

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Over the last year, lots of developers have incorporated LLM coding assistants into their work, finding them a useful tool. But one of the problems of these tools is that they are unreliable, often coming up with poor or outright wrong-headed suggestions.

Artificial Inteligence 234

Artificial Inteligence How To Tools Development 234

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Over the last year, lots of developers have incorporated LLM coding assistants into their work, finding them a useful tool. But one of the problems of these tools is that they are unreliable, often coming up with poor or outright wrong-headed suggestions.

Artificial Inteligence 130

Artificial Inteligence How To Tools Development 130

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 24, 2023

During the last four years, my colleague Unmesh Joshi been developing a collection of patterns to help us all better understand how modern distributed systems work. We've been publishing drafts of these patterns on this site. Now these have turned into a book, published by Addison-Wesley in my signature series. As such, we've now removed the work-in-progress drafts from this site, and have replaced them with a catalog of pattern summaries.

System 202

System Development 202

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

My colleague Sannie Lee has met many students who are looking into getting into technology, taking narrow professionally-oriented majors. Sannie, however, has found that a traditional liberal-arts degree has given her skills that are highly relevant to her work as a product manager.

Product Management 176

Product Management Technology 176

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

It's now been a year since The Muskover, what does my use of social media look like now, both as a reader and a writer?

Media 270

Media Social 270

Martin Fowler

NOVEMBER 1, 2023

As React UI controls become more sophisticated, complex logic can get intertwined with the visual representation. This makes it hard to reason about the behavior of the component, hard to test it, and necessary to build similar components that need a different look. Juntao Qiu tackles this by using a Headless Component , which extracts all non-visual logic and state management, separating the brain of a component from its looks.

Testing 291

Testing 291

Martin Fowler

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

How is code generation with GenAI different from more "traditional" code generators? The newest memo in Birgitta Böckeler's explorations of GenAI talks about abstraction levels in software engineering, and on which levels GenAI sits in the translation of our thoughts into zeros and ones.

Software Engineering 236

Software Engineering Engineering Software 236

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 17, 2023

At Thoughtworks, we are strong practitioners of Test Driven Development (TDD). Naturally this leads to the question of how generative AI can help with this technique. Paul Sobocinski writes a brief memo explaining how some of our teams have used TDD with GitHub Copilot. As ever, co-pilot can't be relied on to fly the plane, but can suggest some useful ideas for the red and green steps.

TDD 224

TDD Test-Driven Development Generative AI Testing 224

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 16, 2023

Time for two more strategic directions from Sarah Taraporewalla. These look at the questions that need to be investigated when reducing cost, minimizing operation risk, and enabling data-driven decision making.

Data 221

Data 221

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 10, 2023

In her 5th memo about exploring GenAI for software development, Birgitta Böckeler answers the frequently asked question if coding assistants are making the practice of Pair Programming obsolete. Spoiler alert: They don't.

Programming 224

Programming Software Development Software Development 224

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 10, 2023

Sarah Taraporewalla moves on to the remaining two strategic directions that are part of growing the business. Expanding into new customer segments can introduce new operational processes or channels. Inorganic growth (eg acquisitions and mergers) needs an understanding of the drivers of increased value and the long term expectation (eg merge or keep separate and divest) for the business unit.

Strategy 222

Strategy 222

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 10, 2023

When scaleups need to start working on cost efficiency, our experience is that they need to form a cost optimization team to work on the immediate steps that are needed. In this installment   Sofia and Stefania describe how to understand the primary cost drivers, together with the levers to get them under control.

How To 228

How To 228

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 8, 2023

My colleague Sarah Taraporewalla describes an approach to building technology strategy that challenges the convention. It starts by identifying the overall strategic directions that the organization is considering, and using common aspects of these directions to indicate the investigations needed for the organization to understand the technology implications raised by that strategic change.

Strategy 192

Strategy Technology Organization Marketing 192

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 3, 2023

While coding assistants like Copilot can improve speed and flow, they can also disrupt it. Birgitta Böckeler looks at two ways in which they can get in the way : amplifying bad or outdated practices, and review fatigue.

Software Review 163

Software Review 163

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 1, 2023

Sofia and Stefania begin their examination of how to get out of the bottleneck of surging cloud costs by relating a case study from a recent client - illustrating how the cost control can be separated into reduce and sustain phases.

Case Study 222

Case Study Study Sustainability Cloud 222

Martin Fowler

AUGUST 1, 2023

The most widely used form of coding assistance in Thoughtworks at the moment is in-line code generation in the IDE, where an IDE extension generates suggestions for the developer as they are typing. Birgitta Böckeler looks at the factors that impact the usefulness of these suggestions, indicating where they lead to safe waters, and the rocks that we need to look out for.

Development 173

Development 173

Martin Fowler

JULY 31, 2023

As startups begin to grow rapidly, they often find that early decisions that helped them find a product/market fit lead to excessive costs once traffic increases. These costs can threaten a scaleup's ability to grow. Sofia Tania and Stefania Stefansdottir have worked with many scaleups in this predicament and share their approach to understanding and reducing these costs.

Marketing 201

Marketing 201

Martin Fowler

JULY 27, 2023

Birgitta Böckeler continues her explorations in using LLMs, this time by asking GitHub Copilot to write a median function. It gave her three suggestions to choose from. The experience shows you still have to know what you're doing when asking LLMs to write code, since the LLM's programming skills are often rather flawed.

Artificial Inteligence 168

Artificial Inteligence Programming 168

Martin Fowler

JULY 26, 2023

My colleague Birgitta Böckeler has long been one of our senior technology leaders in Germany. She's now moved into a new role coordinating our work with Generative AI and its effect of software delivery practices. She's decided to publish her exploration in a series of memos. The first memo looks at the current toolchain for LLMs , categorizing them by what tasks they help with, how we interact with the LLM, and where they come from.

Artificial Inteligence 160

Artificial Inteligence Generative AI Software Technology 160

Martin Fowler

JULY 25, 2023

A two-pizza team is a small team that fully supports software for a particular business capability. The term became popular as it used to describe how Amazon organized their software staff. The name suggests the most obvious aspect of such teams, their size. The name comes from the principle that the team should no larger than can be fed with two pizzas.

Software Review 120

Software Review Microservices Construction Software 120

Martin Fowler

JULY 25, 2023

Any large software effort, such as the software estate for a large company, requires a lot of people - and whenever you have a lot of people you have to figure out how to divide them into effective teams. Forming Business Capability Centric teams helps software efforts to be responsive to customers’ needs, but the range of skills required often overwhelms such teams.

Airlines 141

Airlines Off-The-Shelf Software Development Coaching 141

Martin Fowler

JULY 19, 2023

Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. Pete Hodgson structures how platform teams collaborate into phases of migration, consumption, and evolution. He describes what's different in each of these phases, the operating models to adopt, and which cross-team collaboration patterns work best.

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