Technology Radar - what's hot and what's not

ThoughtWorks has always been proud of its industry thought leadership. In recent years, a notable component of this has been the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Published twice a year, the Radar is ThoughtWorks’ take on new and interesting technologies, tools, platforms and languages. Key themes in the latest edition of the Radar are tools for delivering and testing mobile applications as well as a continued focus on Continuous Delivery and web-based architectures.

In this issue of Perspectives, we have an eclectic mix of articles and blog posts that illustrate the breadth of our interest in the topics of importance to the technology industry, including some that expand on items featured on the Radar.

Nick Hines, Global CTO - Innovation, ThoughtWorks, talks about Continuous Delivery at DevOpsDays Bangalore, the first events of its kind to take place in India.

The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board is a group of senior technology leaders within ThoughtWorks. They produce the Technology Radar to help decision makers understand emerging technologies and trends that affect the market today. This group meets regularly to discuss the global technology strategy for ThoughtWorks and the technology trends that significantly impact our industry. The Technology Radar captures the output of these discussions in a format that provides value to a wide range of stakeholders, from CIOs to enterprise developers. Since the last publication of the Technology Radar, these technology trends are most prominent:

• Tools for effectively delivering and testing mobile web
• Simple techniques for testing and obtaining performance
• Several new approaches to business intelligence
• Continued emphasis on continuous delivery and web based architectures

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Pete Hodgson Testing Mobile Web Apps with WebDriver
We've been building mobile web apps using JQuery Mobile with the main target being webkit-based mobile browsers - Android and iPhone, basically. We're big fans of functional testing, so we spent some time figuring out how to get a good testing infrastructure set up for mobile app development.

Ranjan Sakalley Why is test automation the backbone of Continuous Delivery?
Software testing and verification needs a careful and diligent process of impersonating an end user, trying various usages and input scenarios, comparing and asserting expected behaviors. Directly, the words "careful and diligent" invoke the idea of letting a computer program do the job. Automating certain programmable aspects of your test suite thus can help software delivery massively.

Anand Vishwanath ROI on automated testing - a stepping stone for frequent releases
Building on Ranjan's blog post on automated testing, Anand articulates the benefits of automation in terms of either tradeoffs or statistics to those who still question the value of automated testing, and the investment to be made on them in a project.

Graham Brooks Encapsulating Databases
Small systems grow with success. As these systems grow they often take on more and more functionality either directly into the main system component or into sub-systems. As the systems grow in complexity and responsibility their database requirements grow at a similar rate also becoming more and more complex.

Duncan Cragg FOREST: An Interacting Object Web
ThoughtWorker Duncan Cragg's chapter, “FOREST: An Interacting Object Web”, in the recently-published Springer book, “REST: From Research to Practice”, offers a simple yet powerful approach to RESTful integration architecture. Duncan walks the reader through an example FX (Foreign Exchange) order and fulfillment scenario, showing how FOREST allows two co-operating servers to keep each other notified of significant events in the order lifecycle, from initial contact through to payment. FOREST is a uniquely accessible and straightforward approach to REST interactions for architects and implementors of distributed systems. Further, it maps onto simple and powerful asynchronous and transformational, functional or rule-based approaches to programming.

Webinar: Stop ''Doing Agile'' Start ''Being Agile''
This is the third installment in a series of webinars on Continuous Delivery that cover topics such as DevOps, leadership and integrating processes, and methods for optimizing the entire production and release cycle. This presentation will explore those activities that an agile leader or executive must "do," starting with four key levers for change: “Do Less,” “Speed-to-Value,” “Quality,” and “Engage/Inspire.”

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