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* Refactoring * Agile * Architecture * About * Thoughtworks * * * TOPICS Architecture Refactoring Agile Delivery Microservices Data Testing DSL ABOUT ME About Books FAQ CONTENT Videos Content Index Board Games Photography THOUGHTWORKS Insights Careers Products FOLLOW Twitter RSS Mastodon Software development is a young profession, and we are still learning the techniques and building the tools to do it effectively. I've been involved in this activity for over three decades and in the last two I've been writing on this website about patterns and practices that make it easier to build useful software. The site began as a place to put my own writing, but I also use it to publish articles by my colleagues. In 2000, I joined Thoughtworks, where my role is to learn about the techniques that we've learned to deliver software for our clients, and pass these techniques on to the wider software industry. As this site has developed into a respected platform on software development, I've edited and published articles by my colleagues, both ThoughtWorkers and others, to help useful writing reach a wider audience. photo: Christopher Ferguson Martin Fowler A WEBSITE ON BUILDING SOFTWARE EFFECTIVELY If there's a theme that runs through my work and writing on this site, it's the interplay between the shift towards agile thinking and the technical patterns and practices that make agile software development practical. While specifics of technology change rapidly in our profession, fundamental practices and patterns are more stable. So writing about these allows me to have articles on this site that are several years old but still as relevant as when they were written. As software becomes more critical to modern business, software needs to be able to react quickly to changes, allowing new features to be be conceived, developed and put into production rapidly. The techniques of agile software development began in the 1990s and became steadily more popular in the last decade. They focus on a flexible approach to planning, which allows software products to change direction as the users' needs change and as product managers learn more about how to make their users effective. While widely accepted now, agile approaches are not easy, requiring significant skills for a team, but more importantly a culture of open collaboration both within the team and with a team's partners. This need to respond fluently to changes has an important impact upon the architecture of a software system. The software needs to be built in such a way that it is able to adapt to unexpected changes in features. One of the most important ways to do this is to write clear code, making it easy to understand what the program is supposed to do. This code should be divided into modules which allow developers to understand only the parts of the system they need to make a change. This production code should be supported with automated tests that can detect any errors made when making a change while providing examples of how internal structures are used. Large and complex software efforts may find the microservices architectural style helps teams deploy software with less entangling dependencies. Creating software that has a good architecture isn't something that can be done first time. Like good prose, it needs regular revisions as programmers learn more about what the product needs to do and how best to design the product to achieve its goals. Refactoring is an essential technique to allow a program to be changed safely. It consists of making small changes that don't alter the observable behavior of the software. By combining lots of small changes, developers can revise the software's structure supporting significant modifications that weren't planned when the system was first conceived. Software that runs only on a developer's machine isn't providing value to the customers of the software. Traditionally releasing software has been a long and complicated process, one that hinders the need to evolve software quickly. Continuous Delivery uses automation and collaborative workflows to remove this bottleneck, allowing teams to release software as often as the customers demand. For Continuous Delivery to be possible, we need to build in a solid foundation of Testing, with a range of automated tests that can give us confidence that our changes haven't introduced any bugs. This leads us to integrate testing into programming, which can act to improve our architecture. PHOTOSTREAM Cape Cod, MA (2017) DATA MANAGEMENT There are many kinds of software out there, the kind I'm primarily engaged is Enterprise Applications. One of the enduring problems we need to tackle in this world is data management. The aspects of data managment I've focused on here are how to migrate data stores as their applications respond to changing needs, coping with different contexts across a large enterprise, the role of NoSQL databases, and the broader issues of coping with data that is both Big and Messy. DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGES A common problem in complex software systems is how to capture complicated domain logic in a way that programmers can both easily manipulate and also easily communicate to domain experts. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) create a custom language for a particular problem, either with custom parsers or by conventions within a host language. BOOKS I've written seven books on software development, including Refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and UML Distilled. I'm also the editor of a signature series for Addison-Wesley that includes five jolt award winners. My Books Page... CONFERENCE TALKS I'm often asked to give talks at conferences, from which I've inferred that I'm a pretty good speaker - which is ironic since I really hate giving talks. You can form your own opinion of my talks by watching videos of some my conference talks. My Videos Page... BOARD GAMES I've long been a fan of board games, I enjoy a game that fully occupies my mind, clearing out all the serious thoughts for a bit, while enjoying the company of good friends. Modern board games saw dramatic improvement in the 1990's with the rise of Eurogames, and I expect many people would be surprised if they haven't tried any of this new generation. I also appear regularly on Heavy Cardboard. My Board Games page... TAGS API design · agile · agile adoption · analysis patterns · application architecture · application integration · bad things · board games · build scripting · certification · collaboration · computer history · conference panels · conferences · continuous delivery · covid-19 · data analytics · database · design · dictionary · distributed computing magazine · diversions · diversity · documentation · domain driven design · domain specific language · domestic · encapsulation · enterprise architecture · estimation · event architectures · evolutionary design · experience reports · expositional architectures · extreme programming · front-end · gadgets · ieeeSoftware · infodecks · internet culture · interviews · language feature · language workbench · lean · legacy rehab · legal · metrics · microservices · mobile · noSQL · object collaboration design · parser generators · photography · platforms · podcast · popular · presentation technique · privacy · process theory · productivity · programming environments · programming style · project planning · recruiting · refactoring · refactoring boundary · requirements analysis · ruby · security · talk videos · team environment · team organization · technical debt · technical leadership · test categories · testing · thoughtworks · tools · travel · uml · version control · web development · web services · website · writing 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018 · 2017 · 2016 · 2015 · 2014 · 2013 · 2012 · 2011 · 2010 · 2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005 · 2004 · 2003 · 2002 · 2001 · 2000 · 1999 · 1998 · 1997 · 1996 All Content RECENT CHANGES If you'd like to be notified when I post new material, subcribe to my RSS, Twitter, or Mastodon feeds. I also have a page dedicated to recent changes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MY FAVORITE MUSICAL DISCOVERIES OF 2022 Thu 12 Jan 2023 08:50 EST I continue my habit of picking out six favorite musical discoveries for last year. 2022 includes big-band techno, Mediterranean fusion, afrobeat in England, jazz-folk vocals, and accordion-led jazz trio. more… -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DATA MESH ACCELERATE WORKSHOP Thu 05 Jan 2023 09:20 EST Over the last couple of years, we've been helping several enterprises use the Data Mesh approach to managing analytical data. Shifting thinking to Data Mesh isn't easy, it changes how teams are organized, how work is prioritized, and what technologies to apply. To help our clients do this Paulo Caroli and Steve Upton describe the Data Mesh Accelerate Workshop, a four half-day program to align people involved in the effort and explore the process for identifying and building data products. more… -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FINDING ACCOUNTS TO FOLLOW ON MASTODON Sun 18 Dec 2022 18:16 EST My latest post on Exploring Mastodon looks at how I go about finding people to follow on a site without an algorithm that tries to pick posts for you. more… -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTALLING ORBI WIFI MESH BROKE MY SONOS Wed 07 Dec 2022 10:22 EST I listen to my music using a wired set of Sonos One speakers. Last week I upgraded my wifi by installing a Netgear Orbi Wifi Mesh. After doing this my Sonos system no longer worked properly. After much hunting I managed to find the problem, and it was a simple fix. So I thought I'd share my story in case others run into a similar problem. more… -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCING A PRODUCT DELIVERY CULTURE AT ETSY Thu 01 Dec 2022 10:10 EST A second article exploring the challenges Etsy faced as it scaled up. Tim Cochran relates how CTO Mike Fisher identified problems with the product delivery process, built a cross-functional Product Delivery Culture team to analyze the situation, and began an improvement program based on lean thinking and the ideas of Marty Cagan. more… -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- USING THE CLOUD TO SCALE ETSY Thu 17 Nov 2022 09:01 EST Etsy is a well-known marketplace for craft items. The pandemic led to a huge spike in growth, growing from 46 million buyers to 90 million buyers in two years. Etsy coped with this, with no bottlenecks in the business. One aspect of how they did this was a shift to Google cloud. Tim Cochran and Keyur Govande begin this story by describing the strategic principles that guided this effort and the incremental federated approach that they took. more… TOPICS Architecture Refactoring Agile Delivery Microservices Data Testing DSL ABOUT ME About Books FAQ CONTENT Videos Content Index Board Games Photography THOUGHTWORKS Insights Careers Products FOLLOW Twitter RSS Mastodon © Martin Fowler | Privacy Policy | Disclosures