The document is a technology radar report from ThoughtWorks that discusses emerging technologies and trends. It covers topics such as continuous delivery, mobile applications, cloud computing, web development, agile analytics, and controversies in the industry. For each topic, it provides details on why the technology is important, how organizations can adopt it, example tools, and best practices.

1. September 2011
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
Nick Hines & Ian Cartwright
#thoughtworksradar

2. Tech Radar (1)
Techniques Tools
Platforms Languages
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3. Tech Radar (2)
! Adopt: We feel strongly that the industry should be adopting these items. We
use them when appropriate on our projects.
! Trial: Worth pursuing. It is important to understand how to build up this capability.
Enterprises should try this technology on a project that can handle the risk.
! Assess: Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect your
enterprise.
! Hold: Proceed with caution.
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4. Continuous Delivery – What and Why
! Continuous Delivery – ability to release software on demand
! Next logical step after Agile software development
! Why do we need Continuous Delivery?
• Competitive pressures
• Responsiveness to market
• Customers expect constant updates
• Allows testing of ideas in the market
! What are the benefits?
• Predictability & Reliability
• Fast feedback
• Power in the hands of the business
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5. Continuous Delivery – How (1)
! Development practices
• Code on the mainline - not feature branching (more later)
• Branch by abstraction & Feature toggles
• Automated tests of user journeys
• Automated cross-functional tests – simple performance trending
• Evolutionary DB
! Build and Deployment patterns
• Infrastructure as code
• Continuous Deployment
• Automated database deployment
• A/B Testing, Canary releases, etc
• CI, Build pipelines, etc
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6. Continuous Delivery – How (2)
! DevOps
• Greater cooperation between development and operations
• Use techniques from s/w development e.g. automation and testing
! Tooling
• Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, Powershell
• IAAS
• GO
• Vagrant
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7. Mobile Applications – Why?
! Massive growth in availability of Smart phones and mobile devices
! Apps from stores overtaking “traditional” applications
! Mobile devices becoming default means of accessing information
! Cross-platform still huge challenge
! Enterprise integration and strategy still in infancy
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8. Mobile Applications – How?
! Cross platform mobile toolkits – Holy grail but unfortunately an illusion
! Progressive enhancement – develop for lowest common denominator then
enhance
! Mobile web
• jQuery mobile
• HTML 5
• Offline mobile
! Testing mobile applications
• Selenium 2
• Frank
! Web kit based browsers
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9. Web as platform
! Internet most scalable and resilient “application” on the planet
! Techniques from the web can be used in enterprise applications
• E.g. ATOM as pub/sub
• Use HTTP as default transport mechanism
• Thoughtful caching
• Caching reverse proxies
! Service choreography
! Defined by protocol rather than centrally
! Hypermedia driven application protocols
! Emulate way humans interact with Internet
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10. Web Development
! Many tools/techniques emerging to aid in development of rich HTML
applications
! Javascript as first-class language
! Coffeescript
! Backbone.js
! SASS, SCSS, LESS
! HAML
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11. Cloud Computing
! Despite recent setbacks still huge momentum towards cloud
! AWS outages illustrate need for “cloud friendly” architectures
! Private vs. Public cloud
• Data Protection issues
• Many enterprises still reluctant or unable to use public cloud
! Hybrid cloud to manage excess load
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12. Cloud Platforms (1)
! AWS
• Despite problems range of services continues to expand
• Addition of Oracle and VPC
! Heroku
• Originally RoR PAAS,
• Now supports multiple web frameworks, Java and Clojure
! Cloud Foundry
• Supports Java/Spring applications, Rails, Sinatra, Grails and Node.js also
MongoDB, MySQL and Redis
• Public (VMWare) or Private
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13. Cloud Platforms (2)
! OpenStack
• Open source private cloud
• Leverages existing virtualisation technologies e.g. KVM
• So far compute and object storage but under active development
! Continuous Delivery makes cloud a lot easier!
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14. Agile Analytics – Why?
! Data obesity
• Data collection from web, etc. outstripping ability of business to analyse
it
! Demand for customer insights
• Clients sense that marketing can be better targeted
• Promise of mining trends from social networks
• Traditional finance oriented data warehouses don’t support this kind of
analysis
! Business not getting expected ROI on BI projects
! Long project lifecycles – typically 18+ months
! Major cost overruns – little ability to fail fast
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15. Agile Analytics – What?
! Strong end user value focus – focus on business need not technical solution
! Iterative development approach – answer most important questions first
! Test led development – complexity of BI demands automated tests
! Focus on high value stories – don’t “boil the ocean”
! Same advantages as “normal” Agile
! Use of innovative and open source tools
! Event sourced BI – provides real time analytics
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16. Agile Analytics – Tools
! Use NoSQL databases – column stores and document databases often
better fit to data
! Use Open Source or lightweight BI tools – e.g. Pentaho, JasperSoft,
CloverETL, Talend, BIRT, SpagoBI
! Use Cloud computing to store large data sets
! Use functional langauges/tools e.g. MapReduce, Hadoop for rapid processing
! Leverage existing lightweight tools e.g. Excel for reporting
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17. Some controversies?
! The Future of Java
! Feature Branching
! VCS with “implicit workflow”
! Code in configuration
! Database or Procedure oriented integration
! Java portal servers
! GWT
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18. Build your own Radar!
! Advice: http://tinyurl.com/NealFordRadar
! Tool: https://github.com/bdargan/techradar
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