150 articles from Martin Fowler.
Modern source-control systems provide powerful tools that make it easy to create branches in source code. But eventually these branches have to be merged back together, and many teams spend an inordinate amount of time coping with their tangled thicket of branches. There are several patterns that can allow teams to use branching effectively, concentrating around integrating the work of multiple de
In this article I walk through a set of refactorings from a real code base. This is not intended to demonstrate perfection, but it does represent reality.
Get good audio, use gallery view, mute if not talking, and welcome the cat.
A second post on how Thoughtworks is coping with the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak
We, and our colleagues, are often called on to perform architectural assessments for our clients. When we do this, the architects involved with these systems will talk about the performance of these systems, how resilient they are to faults, and how they are designed to evolve to easily support new capabilities. The elephant that rarely comes up, however, is how different systems contribute to bus
What we've learned so far from dealing with the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak
When customer companies buy software products, they usually need skilled staff to install them. This staff is usually provided by a service provider company, since software product vendors don't find it makes business sense to build their own services arm. Customers need to be aware of the relationship between product vendors and service providers, and should require transparency on the relationsh
In their ideal state, product-mode organizations are formed of loosely coupled, autonomous teams that respond rapidly to articulated and unarticulated user needs. On occasion however, opportunities arise that require a response involving coordination across multiple teams. If not managed effectively the outcome will result in missed revenue, unsatisfied customers and wasted team capacity. We refer
Many people who work in software development today have heard of the practice of pair programming, yet it still only has patchy adoption in the industry. One reason for its varying acceptance is that its benefits are not immediately obvious, it pays off more in the medium- and long-term. And it's also not as simple as “two people working at a single computer”, so many dismiss it quickly when it fe
Over the last decade we've developed and refined a number of techniques that allow a database design to evolve as an application develops. This is a very important capability for agile methodologies. The techniques rely on applying continuous integration and automated refactoring to database development, together with a close collaboration between DBAs and application developers. The techniques wo
In January 2001 two Java tools crossed Refactoring's Rubicon. Refactoring in Java now has serious tool support
For many that come briefly into contact with Extreme Programming, it seems that XP calls for the death of software design. Not just is much design activity ridiculed as “Big Up Front Design”, but such design techniques as the UML, flexible frameworks, and even patterns are de-emphasized or downright ignored. In fact XP involves a lot of design, but does it in a different way than established softw
As XP and other Agile methods gain popularity, questions are beginning to surface regarding how to scale XP beyond teams of 10-12 people. In mid February 2003 a workshop dedicated to the subject was held in Banff Alberta Canada. In this article we report on the keynote speeches from Ken Schwaber, and Martin Fowler, as well as other leading practitioners.
The microservice architectural pattern is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management
In late June over a hundred people gathered on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia to take part in the XP2000 conference to discuss Extreme Programming (XP) and other flexible methodologies.
One of the attractive things about XP is that it gives quite definite statements about what you should do to be doing XP. Furthermore that set of practices is carefully designed to fit together. Taking anything out has serious consequences. Yet one of the principles of XP and other agile methods is that they be self adaptive: that is you should change the process as you are developing the project.
Over the last couple of decades we've seen a growing gap between database-oriented software developers and in-memory application software developers. This leads to many disputes about how to use database features such as SQL and stored procedures. In this article I look at the question of whether to place business logic in SQL queries or in-memory code, considering primarily performance and mainta
It’s hard enough for software developers to write code that works on their machine. But even when that’s done, there’s a long journey from there to software that’s producing value - since software only produces value when it’s in production. he essence of my philosophy to software delivery is to build software so that it is always in a state where it could be put into production. We call this Cont
Why you shouldn't write a lot of documentation.
What does it mean to have a standard UML, and why the standard doesn't standardize as many things as people think it does..
Generative AI and particularly LLMs (Large Language Models) have exploded into the public consciousness. Like many software developers Birgitta is intrigued by the possibilities, but unsure what exactly it will mean for our profession in the long run. She has taken on a role in Thoughtworks to coordinate our work on how this technology will affect software delivery practices. On this page she post
For quite a while now, I've been doing most of my writing using XML - even to the point of writing my last book in XML. As I've mentioned this to people they've asked me a number of questions about my experiences, and that's been enough to prompt this little article on the whole thing.
I'd intended to put together UML diagrams for the patterns in the book. As it turned out I've come the view that other things were more important. Some others did work on diagrams, however, so here there are some for chapters 2-5