Show mobile menu

Blogs

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.

Time to pick a national champion?

“In the mid-1960s, when Australia’s trade minister Sir John McEwen was urging Holden and Ford to seek export markets in Asia, the leader of one of Asia’s poorest countries decided his country needed a car industry.  Defying the advice of economists, he ordered the country’s biggest company to start making cars – with Ford’s assistance.  That country was South Korea … [and] the company was Hyundai.”

Tim Colebatch, Economics Editor, The Saturday Age, 25th May 2013

 

The switch to laissez-faire economics in the latter part of the 20th Century brought considerable benefit to many economies…

Blog post by Eric Jansen
24 May 2013

Original Link

Future Facebook Posts


"Future Facebook Posts is a great activity to get the team members focused on where they want to go rather than on the common "whatif-thoughts" that fills up the brains of engineers when thinking about the future." by chop

Running the activity:

1.   Start by introducing hte Future Facebook Posts activity

Please assume everyone on the team would be posting at Facebook, and imagine you will travel in time and will be able to look at our team timeline (with all posts).

2.      Ask participants to write down future Facebook posts (individually)

You can say something like: Please write down…

Blog post by Paulo Caroli- Agileretroactivities
24 May 2013

Original Link

Tethering your iPad to your iPhone with QuasiDisk

QuasiDisk, if you happened to grab it when it was still in the App Store, allows you to tether...

Blog post by Chad Wathington
24 May 2013

Original Link

The Twisty way of automating

When I joined our employee web portal team as a quality analyst in mid-Jan, I was tasked to “automate ASAP and As Much As Possible”. Sounds familiar?

Thumbnail: 

read more

Blog post by ThoughtWorks Studios
23 May 2013

Original Link

Identity Crisis as a Business Analyst

Few weeks ago I was asked to write a blog post for ThoughtWorks studios. It could be pretty much...

Blog post by Bonna Choi
23 May 2013

Original Link

Being agile instead of doing agile

My last delivery gig was a great reminder about keeping the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto in mind. It was unlike any agile method that you would probably recognise.

We were building a prototype system to demonstrate the capabilities of a technical standard and the data that it contained. Our main stakeholders, both relatively non-technical knew the type of audience the prototype was intended to influence and making a technical standard come to life with an interactive prototype was our remit. We had free reign of how we worked, the technology we used but our approach consistently…

Blog post by Patrick Kua
23 May 2013

Original Link

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

Original Link

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

Original Link

Do we need a Business Analyst on an agile team?

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. 

Thumbnail: 

read more

Blog post by ThoughtWorks Studios
23 May 2013

Original Link

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

Original Link