Archives

A guide to the ideas I have been writing about since returning to this blog — technology leadership, organisational adaptability, and creating strategic options in a period of accelerating change.

There is a common belief that quality and speed exist in tension. Over many years working with engineering teams, I have found the opposite. Quality is what creates sustainable speed.

Diversity is not simply something we measure. It is one of the capabilities that makes organisations stronger — and in a world of increasingly complex problems, it is one of the greatest advantages we can create.

The most valuable part of agile was never the ceremonies themselves. It was the thinking behind them — creating organisations that could learn, adapt, and respond to change.

The difference between someone who can implement a technical solution and someone who creates meaningful impact is often found in what I think of as core skills: curiosity, empathy, communication, and judgement.

A platform is not successful because it exists. It is successful because it makes the right thing easier. Platform engineering is an organisational capability, not a technology capability.

Speed matters, but sustainable speed matters more. Technology excellence is the disciplined practice of building software that solves real problems while remaining resilient, scalable, and adaptable.

AI is not simply improving the tools engineers use. It is beginning to change the relationship between an idea and the software that implements it — and that changes everything about how we design organisations.

For a long time, the role of technology leadership has been measured by what we deliver. But the purpose of technology leadership is to create strategic options for the organisation.

After a few years spent moving from advising organisations on transformation to leading it, I'm returning to writing because the questions facing technology leaders have fundamentally changed.

I stand with my fellow ThoughtWorkers to condemn racism and police violence. We released a statement and I added my signature to it. I have quoted from it

As we shift to self isolating and working from home it’s important to remember that when we are in the office we do move around quite a bit. Think about

How are you going? It's the first question I’m asking my team; and I’m hearing a variety of answers : comments about their desk setup or office chair,

In my last post, I shared an explanation of the key concepts that fall under the Event Driven Architecture umbrella. However, there is a significant

It’s Eventuary all month long at ThoughtWorks Australia. We have so many projects incorporating Event Driven Architecture underfoot that we thought we

It’s Eventuary all month long at ThoughtWorks Australia. We have so many projects incorporating Event Driven Architecture underfoot that we thought we

Recently, I have been consulting to CTO/CIOs to help them create and execute the Technology Strategy for their company. I wanted to share the types of

Ten years ago, to this day, I had an idea to redress how my team considered and approached their Non-Functional Requirements such as Performance. I got

Last week, I shared my experiences with git and feature branching. As I mentioned, we moved away from this and towards feature toggles and branch by

I have been made aware of some negative responses to Martin Fowler and Mike Mason's discussion on Branch By Feature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I agree with

I have heard the car metaphor many times before - you know the one - "are we building a ford, or a ferrari?". But that metaphor though has never really

I love tiny types. I love how they make me feel, how they make me laugh, how easy it is to understand what is going on when they are around. The one

Ok, so I am doing a little happy dance right now, because I managed to get pagination into our application in less than a day. It is not your traditional

Code Contracts is one of the new features in .Net4.0 which brings a little bit of formal specification to .Net applications. As someone who has a

I have been getting my speaking voice ready, and now I am getting set to use it. This week, I am speaking about how to integrate with other systems in my

Do you like TED? I have been enjoying the TED app on the iPad lately, and I recently saw the TED talk given by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO - Why we

I have just finished watching Shelly Correl's talk on How Gender Stereotypes Influence Emerging Career Aspirations, a video filled with really great

How often do you get to work on completely isolated systems? It is seemingly more and more common that your system needs to talk to another system to

In my last post about working with integration points I described how I use anti-corruption layers (wrappers) to hide away any warts of the integration

On my last few projects we had a requirement to integrate our application with another system. Adding to this complexity was the fact that these other

There is something about the phrase Non Functional Requirements that I don't really like. It's the Non bit which gets me - I think that word makes them

The English language is a very complex beast which can easily strike confusion in the most unsuspecting moment. Take, for example, the word "lollies". Did

I was going to start this series off talking about filters and the way that connections are made in your brain, but after hearing about the lap dances at

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend JAOO, an awesome conference for software developers, architects and PMs, for one day. How did I get to?

In my last post about Slippers, I introduced it's philosophy and the places that you could find it. In this post, I will introduce some of its constructs.

There are many template engines that you can choose for the generation of views in your mvc application. The problem with most of the them, however, is

Refactoring a piece of code can be such a thrilling experience when it's finished, but at the same time can also act as the blackhole of time. Recently, I

A few weeks ago, my good buddy Christian Blunden and myself presented at a London Geek Night. For us, it was quite fun and I hope people not only picked

In Coding Tip no27 I explained how I rarely like to use booleans to represent states, and prefer to use an enum. Now that I have all nice little enums

I had a very interesting discussion with Jen Smith today about the differences in approach to faking objects during testing. As a result, I am finally

I have been on a few projects now where we have used ORM libraries to help store our data (eg ActiveRecord for Rails, Hibernate (and it's variants),

On my recent project, I have noticed a resurgence in a pattern that I have seen many times previously: where a field which is represented as a needs to

The classic log-in story is often the story that new-to-agile-ist assume you need to develop first. In fact, it is often the last story that should be

Around my neck of the woods, I have been having a theoretical debate with my colleague Dan Bodart as to the best method signature when it comes to

After a few days of introspection, I have finally decided to post about my reactions to the now infamous Perform like a p0rn star presentation and it's

YouTube is offering you a great new experience to watch your clips with. Their new feature allows you to flip the image upside down! They are recommending

There has been quite a lot of discussion on mailing lists that I am on about what it means to be RESTful. It has occurred to me that the reason for many

Recent psychology research into how a role model impacts careers indicates that women need female role models more than men need male role models. This

If there is one thing that I hate about how a lot of Agile projects are run is the notion that you need to sign up to deliver certain stories/ a certain

Pair programming may feel quite strange and frustrating to those new to it. (I guess it can feel strange and frustrating to those who have been doing for

I have been reading Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, and in it he discusses the events which lead to plane crashes. Gladwell explores the plane crashes of

Stand-up meetings are a healthy part of the daily routine. They are a useful forum to keep everyone up to date with the happenings of the team, escalate

that an agile team in possession of good practices, must be in want of a better way of doing

I am not a huge fan of the iteration-based retrospectives that people usually run. These are the retrospectives in the format where you write about What

I have just finished watching the special features of Surf's Up on the DVD and I was struck with a thought that software development is somewhat similar

The question a lot of people (especially software architects) ask when adopting TDD is how does Architecture fit in the whole Test Driven Design paradigm.

This is part of a conversation I had this week with my pair (in the conversation, I am A and he is B) as we were working on a new story. He, like many

I have been helping my current client introduce TDD, and in doing so explaining principles such as single-responsibility, encapsulation and intention

Those starting out on their XP or Agile journey often hear supposedly enlightening phrases touted by those in the know like "TDD will lead you to better,

If you haven't heard of Australia's plans to censor the internet, let me be the first to inform you. The current government has a plan "to force all

I like celebrating on successes, whether it is making a test pass, finishing a task on a story or finishing the story itself. I also love celebrating what

Someone shared an observation with me today regarding the way ThoughtWorkers talk when referring to classes. Apparently, we say "this guy" a lot; as in

An annoying part of writing a test is the amount of setup an object can need in order to use it within the test. However, there is a solution: builders.

There is no denying that finding a women working in the field of information technology is a rare occurrence. At my current client, I have only seen 1

At the conclusion of a lot of projects, we conduct retrospectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the success factors of the project, discuss

I like recursive algorithms, and I like trees (I mean the data structure, not the perennial wooden plant - of course I like them too). So today, I was

At the moment, it seems quite vogue to say your company is Agile. But what does it really mean? Before joining ThoughtWorks, I worked for a company which

The comments on my last post about acceptance tests have made me think a little more about testing, particularly the value in specifically declaring the

I came across an article the other day about ten easy ways to attract women to free software projects. I am not quite sure what to make of it. All the

There - I said it. Heresy. But, I am yet to be sold on their value. Before I continue, I should describe my observations of acceptance testing. From what

I am often asked how to pronounce my surname. It's not too difficult, but for your benefit, I will now attempt at a phonetic guide to my last name.

I love ReSharper. It makes life in Visual Studio such a breeze. You are just so productive in it, with all of its navigation tools, code completion and

Often, I see tests like the following: This conveys to me two things about the author of the test: They treat tests as second-class citizens They have no

Around ThoughtWorks, there is much discussion about test strategies. The arguments range from setup vs inline; named vs anonymous; mocks vs stubs; high

There are 3 very handy list functions which make dealing with lists a breeze: , and . I have come to the belief that not everyone understands their power,

My colleague Andy posted today about Returning null considered Dishonest and while I agree with his sentiments, I disagree with his solution. Andy's

Lately, I have had the opportunity to add some pretty funky usability behaviour on websites thanks to JQuery and some UI Plugins. If you haven't used

When designing your code, it is important to model the business domain. However, how do you know you have modelled the right domain? Sometimes you need to