Alumni 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.
ThoughtWorks blogs Nossas pessoas estão ficando enlatadas
Dual-track Stakeholder Review
tl;dr: Your product team will need to keep its work visible to stakeholders outside the team. If your product team is doing both discovery and delivery, you’ll need to review both those things. If you’re new to dual-tracking, use this recipe as a starting point. Stakeholder Product Review Recipe Purpose: Keep your product’s health, your […]
The post Dual-track Stakeholder Review appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Team Review and Retrospective
tl;dr: If you’re using a typical Agile process like Scrum or XP you’ll work in short 1-3 week Sprints or Iterations. You’ll finish each Sprint by reviewing the work you’ve done, and reflecting on how you could change the way you work to improve. If you’re a product team doing both discovery and delivery, this […]
The post Dual-track Team Review and Retrospective appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Daily Standup
tl;dr: If you’re a team working together on a product you’ll need a quick review and planning meeting every day. If you’re a team doing both discovery and delivery, that daily review and planning may go a bit differently. Use this recipe as a starting point if you’re new to dual-tracking. Purpose: Use a daily […]
The post Dual-track Daily Standup appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Sprint/Iteration Planning Recipe
tl;dr: If you’re using a typical agile process like Scrum, you’ll break your work into Sprints or Iterations that usually range from 1-3 weeks. You’ll start each Sprint with a planning meeting. If your team is a product team engaged in both discovery and delivery, your planning session will need to account for both kinds […]
The post Dual-track Sprint/Iteration Planning Recipe appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Stakeholder Review
tl;dr: Your product team will need to keep its work visible to stakeholders outside the team. If your product team is doing both discovery and delivery, you’ll need to review both those things. If you’re new to dual-tracking, use this recipe as a starting point. Stakeholder Product Review Recipe Purpose: Keep your product’s health, your […]
The post Dual-track Stakeholder Review appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Team Review and Retrospective
tl;dr: If you’re using a typical Agile process like Scrum or XP you’ll work in short 1-3 week Sprints or Iterations. You’ll finish each Sprint by reviewing the work you’ve done, and reflecting on how you could change the way you work to improve. If you’re a product team doing both discovery and delivery, this […]
The post Dual-track Team Review and Retrospective appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Daily Standup
tl;dr: If you’re a team working together on a product you’ll need a quick review and planning meeting every day. If you’re a team doing both discovery and delivery, that daily review and planning may go a bit differently. Use this recipe as a starting point if you’re new to dual-tracking. Purpose: Use a daily […]
The post Dual-track Daily Standup appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Dual-track Sprint/Iteration Planning Recipe
tl;dr: If you’re using a typical agile process like Scrum, you’ll break your work into Sprints or Iterations that usually range from 1-3 weeks. You’ll start each Sprint with a planning meeting. If your team is a product team engaged in both discovery and delivery, your planning session will need to account for both kinds […]
The post Dual-track Sprint/Iteration Planning Recipe appeared first on Jeff Patton & Associates.
Product Market Fit – This week in Startups
Our team’s work with Marketo has been recognized by Adobe and CIO
Our Marketing team at ICF has been working hard for the last 3 years to make a bigger impact on the organization. That has involved making big changes to how we work: how we collaborate, how we measure and of course, the tools we use. I’m happy to announce that our work has been recognized […]
The post Our team’s work with Marketo has been recognized by Adobe and CIO appeared first on Adam Monago.
Quicker Local Maven Builds
Maven is a depth-first recursive build technology. Projects can be multiple modules in one repo, and if ‘mvn install’ is launched from the root of that repo it will recurse through all the modules depth-first. It’ll do so regardless of what’s changed. There’s the rub: you may have only changed one source file in one module, and that may have been test logic, not ‘prod’ source. Meaning there’s a bunch of needless recursing to get to a “BUILD PASSED” conclusion. As we do this before we commit/push because we’re thorough, not lazy developers.
What’s needed is a faster Maven build…
Overtesting Endpoints
I use Jooby for Java backends when I’m choosing Java for the backend(s). It is well-engineered, the lead (Edgar Espinar) is a force for completion, and most important of all I can deploy many services in one deployment (cookie-cutter scaling style), or split into separately scalable services (micro if you like). I engineer automatic tests into two steps following compilation - pure JUnit tests (no threads, no sockets, no file IO), then service tests via RestAssured (one of many types of integration tests). The former are ~3ms, and the later 150ms - 350ms on my older MacBookAir. Each test that…
Diagrams to help or hinder understanding
I always need a diagram to understand something. Sometimes I make the diagrams. For those, sometimes I’m the leader in the field, but more often I’m trying to make them for myself to understand something that pre-existed.
Food Pyramid
US Dept of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid (1992 to 2005):
USDA “My Pyramid” (2011)
So the newer one is garbage, as it conveys no simple idea. As it happens the old one was simple but not the best nutritional advice, so an upgrade was needed according to the USDA. The pyramid metaphor was powerful, so the new one had to fit that…
New Course – Levelling Up in Auto Layout
Continuous Compliance
Autonomy != Anarchy
You are in a cold conference room, Do you want to use your mac as a heater?
Imagine that you are in cold conference room and you kind of feeling the cold on your head. What do you do when you are in a serious meeting and just can't get out?
If you have a MacBook, you might have a solution.
Use your terminal to run either of these commands to keep your CPU at above 80% or if you want you can run them both.
$ openssl speed
and/or
$ yes > /dev/null
The first command just outputs the ssl cryptography stats and it keeps your cpu busy. The second command just prints the character "y" into IO…
Scenarios using custom DSLs
Recipe for a healthy QA/test relationship with the rest of the org (TOAD!)
First, you need a shared test environment to work in. I recommend beginning with a persistent test environment intended to model your production environment as closely as possible. While you may eventually evolve the ability to share a test environment with commonly-configured VMs or containers, having a persistent shared test environment at the beginning gives everyone the experience of keeping something running that looks a lot like the production system. (TOAD! DevOps!) For that matter, proper use of feature flags and such could make production itself a perfectly fine…