ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks
Privately held
Industry Software industry
Founded 1993
Founder Neville Roy Singham
Headquarters Illinois, United States
Number of locations
 36
Key people
 Martin Fowler Jim Highsmith
Products Mingle, Go continuous delivery, Snap CI, Gauge (alternative for Twist), CruiseControl, Selenium,
Services custom software applications
Number of employees
 4000+
Divisions Thoughtworks Studios
Website www.thoughtworks.com

ThoughtWorks is a privately owned, global technology company. It provides software design and delivery, and pioneering tools and consulting services. The company is closely associated with the movement for agile software development, and has contributed to a range of open source products.

History

1980s to 1990s

In the late 1980s Roy Singham founded Singham Business Services as a management consulting company servicing the equipment leasing industry in a Chicago basement. According to Singham, after two-to-three years, Singham started recruiting additional staff and came up with the name ThoughtWorks in 1990.[1] The company was incorporated under the new name in 1993 and focused on building software applications.[2] Over time, ThoughtWorks' technology shifted from C++ and Forte 4GL in the mid-1990s to include Java in the late 1990s.

1990s to 2010s

Martin Fowler joined the company in 1999 and became its chief scientist in 2000.[3] In 2001, ThoughtWorks agreed to settle a lawsuit by Microsoft for $480,000 for deploying unlicensed copies of office productivity software to employees.[4]

Also in 2001, Fowler, Jim Highsmith, and other key software figures authored the Agile Manifesto.[5] The company began using agile techniques while working on a leasing project.[6] ThoughtWorks’ technical expertise expanded with the .NET Framework in 2002,[7] C# in 2004, Ruby and the Rails platform in 2006.[8] In 2002, ThoughtWorks chief scientist Martin Fowler wrote "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" with contributions by ThoughtWorkers David Rice and Matthew Foemmel, as well as outside contributors Edward Hieatt, Robert Mee, and Randy Stafford.[9]

ThoughtWorks Studios was launched as its product division in 2006. The division creates, supports and sells agile project management and software development and deployment tools including Mingle, Gauge(formerly Twist), Snap CI and GoCD . On 2 March 2007, ThoughtWorks announced Trevor Mather as the new CEO.[10] Singham became Executive Chairman. Also in March 2007, Rebecca Parsons joined ThoughtWorks as Chief Technical Officer.[11][12]

2010s to present

In 2010, Jim Highsmith joined ThoughtWorks.[13] Also in 2010, CTO Parsons was named as one of Fast Company's "Most Influential Women in Technology".[14] At the start of 2012, ThoughtWorks moved its 40-person sales team on straight salaries instead of commission.[15] In early 2012, Aaron Swartz joined the company.[16] In May 2012, Ken Collier joined the company.[17]

In April 2013, ThoughtWorks announced a new collective leadership structure and appointed four co-Presidents of the global organization.[18][19] The appointments followed the announcement that the then current CEO, Trevor Mather, was leaving ThoughtWorks to take up the role of CEO for the used car sales focused, Trader Media Group.[20]

In May 2013, Dr. David Walton was hired as Director of Global Health to "lead its practice in serving the technology needs of healthcare institutions in resource-poor environments."[21] Walton has done work in Haiti since 1999, including helping establish a 300-room, solar-powered hospital and the establishment of a noncommunicable disease clinic.[22] In 2015, Guo Xiao, who started as a developer in ThoughtWorks China in 1999, became the Chief Executive Officer and President. Also in 2015, Chinese marketing data company AdMaster acquired Chinese online form automation platform JinShuJu from ThoughtWorks.[23][24]

ThoughtWorks has more than 4000 employees, working from 36 offices in 14 countries.

Corporate philosophy

ThoughtWorks has a tri-pillar system of corporate beliefs, inspired by Ben & Jerry's model.[25] These beliefs, referred to as the "3 Pillars" include (1) Sustainable Business (2) Software Excellence and (3) Social Justice.[26][27]

Social justice work

ThoughtWorks launched its Social Impact Program in 2009.[28] This program provided pro-bono or other developmental help for non-profits and organizations with socially-driven missions. Clients included Democracy Now! (mobile content delivery site), Human Network International (mobile data collection), and the Institute for Reproductive Health (SMS-based fertility planner).[29][30][31] In 2010, ThoughtWorks provided software engineering services for Grameen Foundation’s Mifos platform.[32] In 2012, the company paired with the GSMA Development Fund to launch an online knowledge-sharing platform designed to help underprivileged populations globally.[33] Since 2013, ThoughtWorks has devoted full-time work to Bahmni, an open-source software for hospital systems in low-resource settings in South Asia.[34] In 2015, ThoughtWorks coordinated with activists for Hands Up United to provide technical training, and its many offices support organizations like Black Girls Code, Systers, MotherCoders, and other organizations that help historically excluded groups to gain technology learning.[35][36][37][38]

On June 1, 2015 ThoughtWorks and the Media Development Foundation (MDF) at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai (ACJ) announced the institution of the ThoughtWorks Chair Professor of Rural India and Digital Knowledge. The Chair, first of its kind exclusively dedicated to journalism across all of rural India. Veteran Indian journalist, former Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu and founder of People's Archive of Rural India, Palagummi Sainath became the first ThoughtWorks Chair Professor in Rural India and Digital Knowledge at the Asian College of Journalism.[39][40]

Hiring and diversity

ThoughtWorks has been known for its rigorous interviewing and hiring processes.[41] Between 2010 and 2015, ThoughtWorks increased its percentage of women in tech roles from 17% to 32%. ThoughtWorks has increased its percentage of females in tech roles by hiring developers who have degrees outside of computer science and ensuring female candidates are interviewed by females.[42] As of 2015, 8% of the company's employees identified as black and 3% as Hispanic. In Australia, ThoughtWorks practices quota hiring (requiring one female hired for every male) and conducts pay reviews to ensure female employees receive equal pay and status.[43]

Agile adoption and leadership

ThoughtWorks has long been a vocal advocate of Agile and Lean principles and practices, speaking often on the topic at conferences and creating Agile self-assessment tests.[44][45][46] Part of ThoughtWorks' client services includes helping large enterprises like GE move to Agile.[47][48] The company employs well-known signatories of the Agile manifesto--Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith—and uses Agile in client projects.[49] Rebecca Parsons, CTO of the company, has served as the Director of the Agile Alliance.[50]

Books by ThoughtWorkers

An abbreviated list of books written by ThoughtWorks employees

Continuous integration and continuous delivery

ThoughtWorks created the first known Continuous Integration server, Cruise, in 2001.[58] This Java-based tool was later open-sourced and renamed CruiseControl. Around 2005 ThoughtWorker Jez Humble, working with Chris Read, Dan North, and several other people, encountered problems with deployment for a large client in London. The group's insights about better deployment practices were summarized in a co-authored paper—"The Deployment Production Line"—presented at the Agile 2006 conference.[59][60] The paper contained one of the first depictions of the modern-day deployment pipeline. Around 2007, after finding CruiseControl limiting, Humble worked alongside a ThoughtWorks team in Beijing to create the tool that later became Go (now styled GoCD).[61] In 2010, Humble and ex-ThoughtWorker Dave Farley published the first book on continuous delivery. The book was based on ThoughtWorkers' experiences with client deployments.[62] The book outlined key principles in continuous delivery, such as frequent releases and trunk-based development. Since then, ThoughtWorks has advocated for continuous delivery through its evangelists, speakers, blog posts, and in client projects such as one at The New York Times and another at the UK Guardian.[63][64][65][66]

Software and services

The company’s primary service is the creation of custom software applications for corporate clients. Projects for North American, European or Australian clients are often delivered from India, China, Brazil or Ecuador. The firm also provides consulting services related to software development, design, architecture, operations and IT transformation among others.

Proprietary software

ThoughtWorks' products division was launched in 2006.[67] The department creates, supports and sells products for agile project management, software development, test automation, and continuous delivery and deployment. In 2012, Chad Wathington and David Rice were announced as co-Managing Directors of the products division.[68] In 2016, Wathington left to join ThoughtWorks' global leadership team. Rice is currently sole Managing Director.

Cruise: on July 28, 2008, ThoughtWorks' product division released a continuous integration server called Cruise. Despite the name, it was not a derivative of the open source CruiseControl, but instead a new product written from scratch, which was released under a proprietary license.[69]

Mingle: Released in May 2007, Mingle is software for agile project management and collaboration. Mingle was the first commercial application to be created using JRuby.[70] Mingle was released as a SaaS offering in 2013.[71]

Snap CI was released into an open Beta in August 2013 and was made available for purchase on a subscription basis in April 2014.[72] Snap CI is a cloud-based continuous integration server and continuous delivery tool that allows users to create, automate, test, and deploy builds. Snap CI supports Android, C++, Clojure, Groovy, Java, jRuby, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala.[73] It supports various deployment platforms such as Amazon AWS and Heroku by modeling the build and deploy process as a deployment pipeline.

Twist was created in 2008. Twist facilitated test automation and functional testing with simple authoring. It is no longer supported by ThoughtWorks.[74]

Open source software and contributions

Selenium: In 2004, ThoughtWorks employee Jason Huggins developed Selenium, a portable software testing framework for web applications, as an internal tool.[75] It was open-sourced later that year.[76]

GoCD, a continuous delivery server, was released by ThoughtWorks products in 2010 and open-sourced in 2014.[77] GoCD specializes in advanced workflow modeling for deployment pipelines. Although free, it also offers a variety of paid support services from ThoughtWorks.[78] Jez Humble, author of the Continuous Delivery book, is a former GoCD product manager. GoCD is available on GitHub.

Gauge, a lightweight cross-platform test automation tool, replaced Twist. Gauge was released by ThoughtWorks' products division in 2015. Although written in golang, Gauge is language-agnostic and allows users to test in any IDE. The tool's architecture was created to be highly modular and plug-in supported, and uses Behavior-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development for functional testing.[79]

Talisman was released in early 2016. Talisman works with local GitHub repos to prevent users from accidentally pushing potentially sensitive information.

Aside from the above products, ThoughtWorks employees regularly work on open source software and create smaller open source products. Open source products and contributions include EBDeployer, an AWS Elastic Beanstalk blue-green deployment automation tool; CSS Critic, a lightweight framework for regression testing CSSs; SandForms, an open-source survey/forms application; coyIM, an instant messaging desktop app for XMPP protocol.[80]

References

  1. ↑ Lundy, Dave. 2003. Ex-activist backs revolution in software. Chicago Sun-Times, October 23. "At the time, I was an independent consultant working in the leasing business, but I realized I didn't want to work on my own. So I recruited a few people, and we built a company called Singham Business Services for two or three years doing consulting and leasing. Then in 1990, I came up with the name ThoughtWorks."
  2. ↑ Gale Directory of Company Histories accessed 2011-7-20 "The fledgling enterprise recruited some of its first technical staff by posting bulletin board notices at the University of Chicago. ThoughtWorks soon grew from an initial staff of 8 people to 30 consultants at the time of its official incorporation in 1993.
  3. ↑ Jones, Capers (2013). The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering. Pearson Education. p. 234. ISBN 9780321903426. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  4. ↑ Simpson, Glen (January 31, 2001). "ThoughtWorks Will Pay $480,000 To Settle Software Copyright Case". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  5. ↑ "Agile Manifesto history". Agile Manifesto.
  6. ↑ Lundy, Dave. 2003. Ex-activist backs revolution in software. Chicago Sun-Times, October 23.
  7. ↑ Martin Fowler books, section: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, accessed 7-20-2011
  8. ↑ Ruby at ThoughtWorks accessed 2007-7-20.
  9. ↑ Fowler, Martin (2002). Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0321127420. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  10. ↑ "ThoughtWorks, Global IT Services Firm, Names Trevor Mather CEO". Business Wire. Brookshire Hathaway. 2007-03-01. Retrieved 2016-01-02.
  11. ↑ Hastie, Shane (June 19, 2012). "An Interview with Rebecca Parsons - ThoughtWorks CTO". InfoQ. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  12. ↑ "Executive Profile: Rebecca Parsons". Bloomberg.
  13. ↑ "Jim Highsmith Joins ThoughtWorks". Information Technology Newsweekly. 28 September 2010.
  14. ↑ Joseph, Damian. "The Most Influential Women in Technology 2010". Fast Company. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  15. ↑ "For Some, Paying Sales Commissions No Longer Makes Sense". The New York Times. November 21, 2013.
  16. ↑ O'Neill, Cathy. "ThoughtWorks". Mathbabe. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  17. ↑ "ThoughtWorks Adds Industry Leader to Agile Analytics Practice". Wireless News. May 9, 2012.
  18. ↑ Smith, Fiona (August 1, 2013). "Thoughtworks: Where Four Heads Are Better Than One". Financial Review. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  19. ↑ "ThoughtWorks Announces New CEO and Collective Leadership Structure". PR Newswire. April 10, 2013.
  20. ↑ Cookson, Robert (April 3, 2013). "Trader Media Resolves Search for Chief". Financial Times. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  21. ↑ "ThoughtWorks Announces the Hiring of Dr. David Walton". Health & Medicine Weekly. May 24, 2013.
  22. ↑ "Bringing the Best of Modern Medicine to Those Who Need It Most" (PDF). National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. NFID. Retrieved April 6, 2016.
  23. ↑ "AdMaster Acquires Chinese Online Forms Firm JinShuJu from ThoughtWorks". M&A Navigator. November 10, 2015.
  24. ↑ "More M&A/IPO News for Nov. 3". Dow Jones. Private Equity & Venture Captal. November 3, 2015. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  25. ↑ "Ben & Jerry's three-part mission guide". Ben & Jerry's. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  26. ↑ Chiranjoy, Sen (March 27, 2010). "Big Software Packages on Last Legs". Economic Times of India. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  27. ↑ Fowler, Martin. "ThreePillars". Martin Fowler's blog. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  28. ↑ Vishy (Aug 29, 2012). "Your Vision. Our Software. World-changing. Introducing ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program". TechSangram. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  29. ↑ "CycleTel overview" (PDF). US AID - African Strategies for Health. US AID. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  30. ↑ "Welcome to the Team ThoughtWorks University!". Human Network International. Human Network International. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  31. ↑ "Aug 12, 2011 update". Facebook. Democracy Now!.
  32. ↑ N, Abhay (July 29, 2010). "ThoughtWorks to help scale up Grameen's Mifos Software Platform". India Microfinance. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  33. ↑ "GSMA LAUNCHES MOBILE AND DEVELOPMENT INTELLIGENCE PORTAL". GSMA. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  34. ↑ "Bahmni FAQ". Bahmmi.org.
  35. ↑ "Black Girls CODE Johannesberg @ThoughtWorks Braamfontein, Johannesburg". Black Girls Code. Black Girls Code. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  36. ↑ "Systers @ 2015 Google I/O". Anita Borg Institute.
  37. ↑ "#Moco Founder Tina Lee and Susmita of ThoughtWorks kicking us off.". MotherCoders. Facebook. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  38. ↑ "FERGUSON REIMAGINED: HANDS UP UNITED LAUNCHES THE 2ND COHORT FOR THE ROY CLAY SR. TECH WORKSHOP". Hands Up United. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  39. ↑ "ThoughtWorks Chair Professor of Rural India and Digital Knowledge - P. Sainath". ThoughWorks. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  40. ↑ "The Media Development Foundation (MDF) and ThoughtWorks Technologies India Private Ltd. are pleased to announce the institution of the ThoughtWorks Chair Professor of Rural India and Digital Knowledge at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai (ACJ). The Chair, first of its kind exclusively dedicated to journalism across all of rural India, was founded on June 1 this year". Asian College of Journalism. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  41. ↑ Smith, Jacquelyn (August 9, 2013). "The 25 Companies That Give The Most Difficult Job Interviews". Forbes. Retrieved April 28, 2016.
  42. ↑ Peck, Emily (Jun 18, 2013). "This Company Proves You Can Hire More Women In Tech Right Now. No More Excuses!". Huffington Post. Retrieved April 28, 2016.
  43. ↑ "Case Studies: Research showcasing leading practice in two organisations" (PDF). Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Australian Government. Retrieved 28 April 2016.
  44. ↑ Silverman, Rachel Emma (Feb 2, 2012). "No More Angling for the Best Seat; More Meetings Are Stand-Up Jobs". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved May 12, 2016.
  45. ↑ "New 'ThoughtWorks Learning' Roadshows, Training and Knowledge Help Accelerate Agile Adoption and Success". PR Newswire. Retrieved May 12, 2016.
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  47. ↑ King, Rachael (May 30, 2012). "GE Becomes More Agile". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 May 2016.
  48. ↑ Skelton, Matthew (Oct 9, 2013). "Leaving the Platform–Branching and Releasing for Independent Subsystems". The Trainline. Retrieved 12 May 2016.
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  50. ↑ "Keynote: Rebecca Parsons". Agile on the Beach Conference. Retrieved May 12, 2016.
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  52. ↑ Fowler, Martin. "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture". Amazon.com. Addison-Wesley Professional. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
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  54. ↑ Humble, Jez. "Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale". Amazon.com. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  55. ↑ Newman, Sam. "Building Microservices". Amazon.com. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  56. ↑ Narayan, Sriram. "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery". Amazon.com. Addison-Wesley Professional. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  57. ↑ Morris, Kief. "Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud". O'Reilly. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
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  59. ↑ Humble, Jez. "Implementing Continuous Delivery: Patterns". ContinuousDelivery.com. Jez Humble. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  60. ↑ Humble (et. al.), Jez. "The Deployment Production Line" (PDF). ContinousDelivery.com. ThoughtWorks Limited. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  61. ↑ Humble, Jez. "Go Goes Open Source". ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  62. ↑ Pais, Manuel (Jul 21, 2014). "The Birth of Continuous Delivery and DevOps". InfoQ. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  63. ↑ Hildrew, Simon (Sep 27, 2014). "Delivering Continuous Delivery Continuously". InfoQ. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  64. ↑ Frons, Marc (April 14, 2015). "NY Times IT Capitalizes on Continuous Delivery to Move Faster". Enterprisers Project. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  65. ↑ Morris, Kief. "Infrastructure as Code: From the Iron Age to the Cloud Age". ThoughtWorks Insights. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  66. ↑ "Speaker: Ken Mugrage". QCon London. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  67. ↑ Fowler, Martin. "Continuous Integration". MartinFowler.com. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  68. ↑ Philip, Matt. "Two-in-a-Box: A Modest Success Story of Collective Leadership". Matt Philip. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  69. ↑ "CruiseControl". SourceForge. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  70. ↑ "Mingle from ThoughtWorks Studios to Be the First Commercial Software in JRuby". Business Wire. Berkshire Hathaway. Retrieved 2016-01-02.
  71. ↑ "Mingle in the Cloud". ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  72. ↑ Bugayenko, Yegor. "10 Hosted Continuous Integration Services for a Private Repository". Yegor256.com. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  73. ↑ "Languages and Build Tools supported on Snap CI". Snap CI. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  74. ↑ "A Farewell to Twist". Twist Automated Testing. ThoughtWorks, Inc. Retrieved 2016-01-02. (subscription required (help)).
  75. ↑ Copeland, Patrick (19 September 2007). "Selenium's Inventor". Google. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  76. ↑ "Selenium History". SeleniumHQ. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  77. ↑ Avram, Abel (7 March 2014). "ThoughtWorks Open Sources Go, a CD Tool". InfoQ. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  78. ↑ "Go Support Services". GoCD. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  79. ↑ "Gauge a Reliable Behaviour Driven Testing Tool". Software Testing Solution. Nov 2, 2015. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  80. ↑ "Open Source: What Are We Working On?". ThoughtWorks Open Source. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved 6 July 2016.

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