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Text Content

 * 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

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FOLLOW

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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 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



San Francisco




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 · data
mesh · 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 · generative AI ·
ieeeSoftware · infodecks · internet culture · interviews · language feature ·
language workbench · lean · legacy modernization · 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

2024 · 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, subscribe to my RSS,
LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, or X (Twitter) feeds. I also have a page dedicated
to recent changes.

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EXPLORING GEN AI: COPILOT'S NEW MULTI-FILE EDITING

Tue 19 Nov 2024 10:17 EST

A very powerful new coding assistance feature made its way into GitHub Copilot
at the end of October. This new “multi-file editing” capability expands the
scope of AI assistance from small, localized suggestions to larger
implementations across multiple files. Birgitta Böckeler tries out this new
capability and finds out how useful its changes tend to be, and wonders about
what feedback loops are needed with them.

more…

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POSTING ON BLUESKY, AND OTHER THOUGHTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Wed 13 Nov 2024 12:33 EST

With the recent uptick in tech activity on Bluesky, I've decided that I will
start posting there in addition to my current locations.

I've also put together my general thoughts on the state of social media, and how
I'm using it, now that it's two years since The Muskover.

more…

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USING THE STRANGLER FIG WITH MOBILE APPS

Tue 29 Oct 2024 10:34 EDT



My colleagues are often involved in modernizing legacy systems, and our approach
is to do this in an incremental fashion. Doing this with a mobile application
raises some specific challenges. Matthew Foster and John Mikel Amiel Regida
share their experiences of a recent engagement to do this, shifting from a
monolithic legacy application to one using a modular micro-app architecture.

more…

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INTERVIEWED BY BOOK OVERFLOW PODCAST ON REFACTORING

Fri 04 Oct 2024 09:16

I was interviewed on the Book Overflow podcast about the Refactoring book. We
talked about the origins of the book, the relationship between refactoring,
testing, and extreme programming, how refactoring is used in the wild, and the
role of books and long-form prose today.

more…

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LEGACY MODERNIZATION MEETS GENAI

Tue 17 Sep 2024 09:07 EDT



Most of the talk about the impact of GenAI on software development is about its
ability to write (messy) code. But many of us think it's going to be much more
useful to help us understand existing messy code, as part of a modernization
effort. My colleagues Alessio Ferri, Tom Coggrave, and Shodhan Sheth have been
considering how GenAI can do this, including building an internal tool to help
explore the possibilities. The tool uses an LLM to enhance a knowledge graph
based on the AST of the code base. It also uses an LLM to help users query this
knowledge graph.

more…

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


GOVERNING DATA PRODUCTS USING FITNESS FUNCTIONS

Thu 05 Sep 2024 09:37 EDT



Decentralized data management requires automation to scale governance
effectively. Fitness functions are a powerful automated governance technique my
colleagues have applied to data products within the context of a Data Mesh.
Since data products serve as the foundational building blocks of a data
strategy, ensuring robust governance around them significantly increases the
chances of success. Kiran Prakash explains how to do this, starting with simple
tests for key architectural characteristics and moving on to leveraging metadata
and Large Language Models.

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

Radar


FOLLOW

RSS

Mastodon

LinkedIn

X (Twitter)

BGG

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