Thoughtworks

Well, and so this was so Mark and I were both doing a lot of presentations during this time of our career because we were still working on a lot of these kind of systems sort of reluctantly.

In fact, I was working for ThoughtWorks, and we were very much holding our nose building these kind of systems because they were not the kind of thing that we were normally kind of working on.

And the presentations were rife with these kind of metaphors.

So I remember one of my presentations, I introduced the horse scale of SOA, where I showed a picture of a unicorn, which is the thing you think you're getting.

I love it

... um, you know, e- e- like many people, I was working in a company called ThoughtWorks in London in sort of, um, around 2010, and it was just at the beginning of the lean startup boom.

Eric Ries had just written The Lean Startup, and so many people were fascinated about entrepreneurship and experimentation, and, you know, e- everybody wanted to do it.

But The Lean Startup felt very much like a book for startups.

And, um, our larger, more established or scaling companies were sort of like, "Well, look, we're not a startup.

We have to deal with regulation.

We have to deal with, you know, uh, scale innovation." And one of my colleagues, uh, ThoughtWorks was a company that just produced, uh, authors and books and a lot of leading-edge, fantastic people.

Uh, Martin Fowler, who, you know, was one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith, all these people worked there.

I think the point is readability.

So if you're using cucumber and Q, can you have the given when then assertions or robot framework where you can free form your tests? Or I don't know if you've heard of it, but Concordian, um, that allows you to instrument Concordian and gauge by ThoughtWorks, both allow you to instrument markdown and then use that markdown to drive your tests.

And you could, in theory, have a product owner.

That's not technical.