Technology Radar for Technology Strategy. What is it and how to build it?
Hello everyone! In this article I would like to share my knowledge about a very interesting tool — technology radar. What is it and how does it help you to manage your company technology strategy?
In this article I will not talk about the technological strategy and how the technology strategy helps you to understand your technology landscape (or sometimes technology chaos), make an assumption of the architectural decision and align development of new projects and products in different departments. I would like to tell you about a tool that helps you to visualise your technological strategy.
I would like to notice that basically the technology radar shouldn’t look like a radial diagram. It can be an excel list of frameworks, languages and tools that you are using in your company. But in diagram way it is more understandable. Creating radar using an open source technology is not so complicated.
In my opinion, one of the most popular and easiest way to create a technology radar is an open source solution from Thoughtworks.
In the end of this article I will share some examples of the TechRadar from IT companies.
What is TechRadar?
Technical Radar is using two categorizing elements: the quadrants and the rings. The quadrants represent different kinds of blips. The rings indicate what stage is in an adoption lifecycle.
The quadrants are a categorization of the type of blips:
- Programming Languages and Frameworks.
- Tools. These can be components, such as databases, software development tools, such as versions control systems.
- Platforms. Things that we build software on top of such as mobile technologies like Android, virtual platforms like the JVM, or generic kinds of platforms like hybrid clouds.
- Techniques. These include elements of a software development process, such as experience design; and ways of structuring software, such as microservices.
Technology Radar has four rings:
- The Adopt ring represents blips that you used in your company on production. Blip in the Adopt ring represents something where there’s no doubt that it’s proven and mature for use.
- The Trial ring is for blips that are ready for use, but not as completely proven as those in the Adopt ring. So you should use these on a trial basis, to decide whether they should be part of your toolkit.
- The Assess ring are things to look at closely, but not necessarily trial yet — unless you think they would be a particularly good fit for you.
- The Hold ring is for things that, even though they are accepted in the production, you haven’t had a good experience with.
Why do you need the Technology Radar?
What benefits will you get when you create your own technology radar?
- Firstly, creating the TechRadar is a very valuable exercise. It helps you to do an audit of your technological portfolio. Find the potential risks and dark spots. Align using technologies between your development teams.
- It gives more transparency for your technological department. TechRadar helps your teams and architects choose the best technologies for future projects. And It shows the current state of your technology landscape and teams can choose the best tools and technology that are already adopted in your company and shows very good results.
- If you keep TechRadar open for everybody outside of your organisation it can be very beneficial for your HR and technological brand. On the one hand potential candidates can see the technological stack of the company. On the other hand you will be able to understand whether the knowledge and experience of the candidate are suitable for your technologies.
How to create and update?
TechRadar is a live tool. And you should keep this tool up to date because this is your current technological landscape and the future target.
Depending on the size of your organisation updating the radar can be done by the community of the most active engineers, team leaders, architects or special department of innovation and technology (if you are a big corporation).
It is advisable to check and update the radar at least once every 6 months. Check legacy technologies, whether it’s time to change them to new ones that have passed the adaptation period. And check current radar for your target technology strategy.
When you introduce new technologies or tools in your teams — check with Tech radar. Perhaps the new technology is already being tested in another team and you will save time.
Several examples
- Avito.ru — https://techradar.avito.ru/
A good example of technology radar is created by Avito.ru
You can trace the usage and adaptation of many technologies and languages in this company.
For example, you can see that TeamCity is currently running in trial mode — a CI server that is used to build and deploy services, to run monolith tests. To which Avito switched from Bamboo. Or ClickHouse proved to be excellent in conjunction with Grafit, as a database used to store time series to which company switched from Whisper (now in Hold).
Other examples:
- Lamoda — https://radar.thoughtworks.com/
- Zelando — https://opensource.zalando.com/tech-radar/
- AOE — https://www.aoe.com/techradar/index.html
- Thoughwokrs — https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
Thank you! I hope that this article was helpful and interesting for you.
