An Open Letter to the Thoughtworks Tech Radar Team
Dear Thoughtworks Radar Team,
I attended your Tech Radar webinar this Tuesday. It’s a great initiative — sharing your internal research and thinking with the wider developer community is genuinely valuable. I’d like to share a couple of thoughts.
One Hour Is Not Enough
One hour to cover all four quadrants is too short. The rush through each section left little time for Q&A, and some points felt underdeveloped. I understand this is a free webinar and you’re investing significant effort and money into producing it, but I’d suggest either:
- A 4-part webinar (one quadrant per session), or
- A 2-part webinar (two quadrants each)
This would give each area the depth it deserves and open up space for real conversation.
Application Security Deserves a Seat at the Table
In the Techniques section, I’d argue that application security should be a first-class citizen — on par with performance testing. A security flaw is one of the most embarrassing moments an organization can face, and security concerns are often invisible in user stories. It falls on the development team to identify, test for, and code against vulnerabilities as early as possible.
I’d be curious to know whether Thoughtworks is using any dedicated security tooling beyond incorporating security into functional test suites.
What I Took Away
On the positive side, there were a lot of takeaways for a developer like me. Several items in the Hold category made much more sense after hearing the reasoning behind them. The Radar helps put a name and a framework to things I’d been feeling intuitively about certain tools and approaches.
Eagerly looking forward to the next edition.
Yours truly, A developer still learning.
PS: For others, here’s the link to the Thoughtworks Tech Radar.