Thought Leaders who disrupted the Software Industry

There is something in common among thought leaders.  Their thought innovations simply disrupt an existing paradigm.  Today we will see a few of those who really disrupted the Software Industry, be it in Development or Testing or Databases through their inventive and innovative thinking.

Kent Beck:

Kent Beck is the creator of the revolutionary ExtremeProgramming or XP as it is shortly called, along with 2 other notable thought leaders and improvisational Test DrivenDevelopment.  He is also the mastermind behing JUnit, the xUnit class of Unit Testing Frameworks.  These innovations eventually formed the basis for what we currently call Agile SoftwareDevelopment.

Martin Fowler:

If you don’t know him, then probably you are not in touch with the Software industry recently.  MartinFowler is a chief Scientist in Thoughtworks.  He is a highly reputed international speaker and is a guru who popularized Agile and NoSQL to a great extent.  He along with other thought leaders formed the Agile Manifesto.  Some of his notable writings include Evolutionary Design, Agile, ContinuousIntegration, ContinuousDelivery, NoSQL and Mobile and is a author of several best selling books.

Ward Cunningham:

He is one of the 3 inventors of the Extreme Programming.  Also a pioneer in Design Patterns, Extreme Programming and the Agile movement and one of the thought leaders who framed the Agile Manifesto.  He is also the inventor of the Wiki and the popular FITframework. 

Ron Jeffries:

He is also one of the 3 inventors of the Extreme Programming.  He is also the author of one of the best selling books “ExtremeProgramming Adventures in C#” where he wrote about his journey through XPing using a new programming language (C#).

James Bach:

James Bach is a revolutionary thought leader in the field of Software Testing.  He is most notable for his works on Exploratory Testing along with other thought leaders, Session Based Testing and Context Driven School ofTesting. 

Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland:

Inventors of the ever so popular Scrum methodology in Agile, which revolutionized the way of working for teams and brought a new perspective to Agile Projects.  They are also the initial signers of the Agile Manifesto.  Ken Schwaber is also a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum.org.  He is also a book writer and has written on varioustopics in Scrum.

Michael Stonebraker:

A computer scientist and one of the fathers in the Database Management Systems.   He is the inventor of the RDBMS Ingres and Postgres.  He is a pioneer in the field of Big Data and is most notable for his work in Vertica and VoltDB.  He is also one of the criticsof the NoSQL movement.

There are a handful lot of other Thought leaders in the industry, but unfortunately we would not be able to cover everyone in this post.  Do you aspire to become a Thought Leader?  Who is your most favorite and respected Thought Leader?

About the Author

Rajaraman Raghuraman has nearly 8 years of experience in the Information Technology industry focusing on Product Development, R&D, Test Data Management and Automation Testing.  He has architected a TDM product from scratch and currently leads the TDM Product Development team in an IT MNC.  He is passionate about Agile Methodologies and is a huge fan of Product Development, Agile Development and Agile Testing.  He blogs at Test Data Management Blog & Agile Blog.  Connect with him on Google+

Power of the Startup Culture - Small or Big Organization

Everyone knows a thing or two about Startups.  Either they are involved in one or read about one.  The most important thing about the Startups and why it is so exciting is the culture within the startups.  And it is quite true that, even though rare, startup cultures can prevail even in large organizations.  But definitely not without the support of the management.  So that brings us to the question, what exactly is this startup culture and what are the exciting things that are associated with this so called startup culture.  In this article, I am going to point out few things that make together the startup culture.

• Passion
• One thing that you get a lot from people working in a startup or a startup setup (like a very small team in a large organization) is plenty of passion.  People are passionate about their work, their team, their product or their service, their organization, their managers, they are passionate about literally everything.
• Lots of energy
• The thing that passion brings to the table is the high energy, it almost feels like you have plenty of electricity, we will only need to utilize the energy in an effective way.
• Group & Individual Ownership
• People tend to take / have a lot of individual as well as collective ownership in a startup setup.  Every loss of the product/service/company is treated as their personal & team loss and they take collective responsibility and every victory is cherished as their personal and team victory.