Thought Works - History

History

In the late 1980s Roy Singham founded Singham Business Services as a management consulting company servicing the equipment leasing industry in a Chicago basement.

In 1993 the company was incorporated and the name changed to ThoughtWorks. The focus became building software applications.

ThoughtWorks' technology capabilities have evolved from its use of C++ and Forte 4GL in the mid-1990s to include Java in the late 1990s.

The company began using agile techniques while working on a leasing project Martin Fowler began working with ThoughtWorks in 1999 and was hired in 2000 as Chief Scientist. In 2000 Martin Fowler and Matthew Foemmel first described the use of the technique of Continuous Integration for large-scale software projects. This resulted in the Open Source project CruiseControl created by ThoughtWorks as the first continuous integration server.

The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, with Chief Scientist Martin Fowler and Executive Consultant Jim Highsmith two of the co-authors. This document propounded the core principles that are the basis for agile software development.

ThoughtWorks’ technical expertise expanded with the .NET Framework in 2002, C# in 2004, Ruby and the Rails platform in 2006.

ThoughtWorks Studios was launched as its product division in 2006. The division creates, supports and sells agile project management and software development and deployment tools including Mingle, Twist and Go.

On 2 March 2007, ThoughtWorks announced Trevor Mather as the new CEO.

ThoughtWorks initiated a Social Impact Program in 2009.