What Happened to ThoughtWorks?

Why has a leading software technical consultancy firm, once renowned for its innovation and positive impact on Agile practices, gradually lost relevance over time?

Substack version of this article.

Last night, my daughter, reading the “Continuous Delivery” book, said, “It seems many things came out of ThoughtWorks”. I replied, “ThoughtWorks had a very good reputation. Some world-class and innovative programmers worked there”. Then I listed, without thinking, a few thoughtworkers (the term they used to describe Thoughtworks Consultants; the years in brackets are their ThoughtWorks time):

• Martin Fowler, who needs no introduction
  Martin’s classic book “Refactoring” and “Continuous Integration” article (original version, 2000) have a special status in Software Engineering history. Please note both are related to test automation.
• Jon Tirsen, (2003–2008), the creator of Nanning, which inspired Dependency Injection
• Bret Pettichord (2004–2005), creator of Watir.
  (Interestingly, Bret helped promote Selenium v1 to the testing community)
• Jason Huggins, (2000–2007), creator of Selenium v1.
• Aslak Hellesøy ( 2003–2006), creator of Cucumber.