Updated Technology radar. Agile Developement

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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