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Lots of our people have lots of opinions. Here are just a few of them

ThoughtWorks embraces the individuality of the people in the organization and hence the opinions expressed in the blogs may contradict each other and also may not represent the opinions of ThoughtWorks.

What is Failure Demand in Software Development

The idea of “Failure Demand” comes from systems thinker, John Seddon, who describes it as “unnecessary burden on the system.” By looking at removing failure demand on a system, you free up more capacity to focus on value added work. Much of failure demand also maps to the lead concept of “waste” although not all “waste” is the same as failure demand.

Some classic examples (and tell-tale signs) I see with companies include:

  • Poor quality work – Features that are not tested, or well designed end up generating bugs. A smell to look for is lots of issues…

Blog post by Patrick Kua
23 May 2013

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Making google analytics work with requirejs

We were trying to template google analytics and make it part of our requirejs setup. When we did what we thought was obvious to wrap it in a module and declare a dependency on it, it seemed to fail quite miserably.

The trick was that we missed that you needed to export a global variable. This means in the javascript file initialising google analytics we had to add the following code block

var registerGoogleAnalytics = function(accountId) {
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  if (window) {
    window._gaq = _gaq; // export as global
  }
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', accountId]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
…

Blog post by Patrick Kua
23 May 2013

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Do we need a Business Analyst on an agile team?

Bonna Choi

Out of many roles on an Agile team - developer, tester, project manager or product manager, the role of the business analyst is probably the one whose “existence” on the team is most frequently challenged. The role of a BA is often questioned, not the quality of work, but the “perceived” value delivered for the team - by clients. Frankly I’ve had a few identity crisis since I started working as an analyst on agile teams in 2006. 

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Blog post by ThoughtWorks Studios
23 May 2013

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This is annoying

You can read the title as “How to make your recently created android app’s file visible”.

I am recetly playing around with Android Platform and around goods and bads this is just annoying. Android has an complex user mode mecanism to segregate application namespace. It is based on linux user mode and each application has its own, well, user. It is OK and brings up a good security policy but has some trade offs as well.

Going specific to what I want to say about files: You do have many ways to write a file with…

Blog post by Filipe Gomes Esperandio
22 May 2013

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PMI - Plus, Minus, Interesting



PMI (plus, minus, interesting) is a retrospective activity that encourages participants in a discussion to look at an idea from more than one viewpoint.

Running the activity:

1.       Split the canvas into 3 areas: plus, minus, interesting.


2.       Ask participants to add notes to each area

So, in the context of this retrospective, please share with us what you consider: positive (Plus), negative (Minus), or Interesting. Please write each note on a post-it, and place them on the respective canvas area.

3.       Group conversation about the notes
  

 The PMI thinking activity was developed by Dr.…

Blog post by Paulo Caroli- Agileretroactivities
22 May 2013

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May 2013 edition of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board (TAB) has released the latest edition of our technology radar. This is where we highlight some of the technologies that are currently attracting our attention and that we feel are worth you taking a look at. In this edition our themes include my long term interest in breaking down boundaries between people and groups, lightweight option for analytics, infrastructure as code, and applying the practices that have worked well for us in development to places that are missing them.

Blog post by Martin Fowler
22 May 2013

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Panic not over yet - one click from you can help Amnesty (no commitment or payment required)

Exciting news! Further to a previous post about the success of the Makeathon, some of my colleagues have continued the great work on the Panic Button app. Amnesty International has just been chosen as a finalist in Google's Global Impact Challenge for the work on a mobile alert system ("panic button"). The app enables human rights activists to trigger rapid response from their network in an emergency. Four out of ten projects will win £500,000. Public voting open now and until the 31st May. Please watch and vote at http://bit.ly/13KtuEl. Please vote and help share this widely with your…

Blog post by Lindsay Ratcliffe
22 May 2013

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Users write/talk about Go

This is a compilation of user authored material that references Go. I expect to keep growing this list. Feel free to submit links via comments.
  1. http://www.slideshare.net/matthewskelton/end-toend-deployment-pipelines
  2. ancestry.com's talk at Chef Conf (Go+Chef+Powershell)
  3. CD and one touch deployment by Rustin Daniels
  4. Continuous Delivery into Maven Central with Maven and Go
  5. http://delivermind.blogspot.in/2012/05/why-i-love-go.html  
  6. Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels showcases a team that uses Go
  7. Deployment pipeline for infrastructure using Go - NBN case study  
  8. How moneysupermarket.com implemented CD
  9. Using Go for mobile app dev - iOS and iPhone
And here is…

Blog post by Sriram Narayan - Go
22 May 2013

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Making jade and mustache templating work together

One our frustrations using jade and icanhaz (a javascript front end mustache implementation) was that when we were trying things that were obvious to us, jade would simply fail to template and we weren’t sure what was causing it.

Fortunately small TDD cycles and experimentation made us realise that it was the combination of new line characters and mustache code made jade work/break.

We would try something like this:

script(type="text/html", id="my_checkbox", class="partial")
  li 
    label(for="{{code}}")
      {{name}} 
    input(id="{{code}}", checked="checked", name="{{code}}", type="checkbox")

The set of statements above would be valid mustache (once converted to HTML) but jade…

Blog post by Patrick Kua
22 May 2013

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Announcing FlowCon

I spend quite a lot of time at conferences, and it consistently bothers me that they are so often focused on one particular function: development, testing, UX, systems administration. The point of continuous delivery is to accelerate the rate at which we can learn from each other – and from our customers. That requires everyone involved in the delivery process (including users, product owners and entrepreneurs) to collaborate throughout. So why isn’t there a conference which focuses on flow – the emergent property of great teams?

So I got together with a bunch of like-minded folks – Elisabeth Hendrickson…

Blog post by Jez Humble – Continuous Delivery
22 May 2013

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