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+
