Technology Registry — Radar’s Younger Sibling
The idea of the technology radar based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks is pretty well-known nowadays. In this short article, I will explain my personal experience with the radars and the reasons why I have approached the concept in a slightly different way and created the Technology Registry with the help of my colleagues at Quadient.
There are many great sources explaining the idea and benefits of the technology radar. I will assume that you already know what it is about — if not, please watch this video or read Neal Ford’s article that explains it nicely.
Personally, I love technology radars. They are good guides in today’s world where it is almost impossible to catch every new technology on the market. Regarding that, I always think of the article How It Feels to Learn JavaScript in 2016. Even though I strongly agree with most of the usually described benefits of radars, I have found a somewhat different motivation to create something like that over the time. In Quadient, we always innovated somehow — naturally, even without the radar. And surprisingly it scales well even when the company grows. On the other hand, what does not scale that well is sharing the experience.
Motivation
I believe you know a situation when you used a library, a framework, a tool and you ended up in a situation that you needed help with. Official training materials, paid workshops, online courses — all of these are fine but very often you get into a “dark corner” of your very precise use case where none of the above will help you with. That is because:
The experience is what is truly needed when using the technology for the specific use case.
That is why you will end up on the Stack Overflow web most of the time trying to find the best answer. Or maybe the situation develops like this:
If you are lucky or your company is small enough, you have an expert sitting in the same room, or you know where to find them. However, if the company is bigger, it is not that easy.
Then, you may like to have some kind of phone book with technology names and contacts to the experts in them (e-mail, IM number…). Additionally, a brief description of the use cases for the technology would be beneficial. And that is exactly what led me to the idea to create the Technology Registry in Quadient (many thanks to Tomas Deml who gave me the initial idea during our trip to Olomouc).
Technology Registry
The Technology Registry is a simple list of technologies that we work with, where every item contains:
- brief info about the technology
- contacts to the experts
- list of specific use cases in our products
- a category and a lifecycle phase (will be described later)
In Quadient, we are using the Confluence wiki for the knowledge base. So, in our context, there is a wiki page for every technology. It looks like this:
The category and lifecycle phases are not visible in the screenshot and they are represented as tags on the wiki page. The categories are exactly alike to the quadrants in the technology radars. They simply help to organize technologies (in our context languages, frameworks, tools, runtime).
The lifecycle phases are almost identical with the rings in technology radars. However, we are using a different naming and an order that more precisely fits the lifecycle of technologies:
- consider = we consider to use it and we are looking for the right use case for the pilot
- pilot = we are piloting it and we may or may not use it later
- use = we use it (in production) and will continue using it for suitable use cases
- abandon = we use it but we are abandoning it (will not use it for anything new)
Visualization
To support an idea of something, visualization helps a lot. I have made a small research and asked people what visualization would be the best for the registry. It comes as no surprise that the most suitable visualization uses circles in exactly the same way as technology radars.
Here you can see THE FULL VISUALIZATION of my personal registry.
It was natural to keep the categories as quadrants, equally to the radar. The rings (lifecycle phases) are slightly different as it simply would not make sense to put abandon before consider because in the real life, you usually use something before you abandon it over the time. Actually, the abandon phase does not fit any “proper” placement, and that is why we simply omitted it in the circles, and kept it only in the legend. We also came to the conclusion that it would be better to put the most important technologies (use) in the biggest circle, even though radars work the opposite way and the adopt ring is the smallest. Not only does it give the most important items the biggest space, but it is also quite usual to have the most of the technologies in the use phase. In my experience, there are just a few technologies in the consider or the pilot phase. To support the idea, we also used a different size and color brightness for the lifecycle phases.
I open-sourced the code of the visualization and all the information about it is also in my GitLab repository. Many thanks to guys from Zalando who also build their own technology radar and open-sourced the code for it, which was the base for my work.
Conclusion
The Technology Registry and the Technology Radar are both very similar even though the original motivation to build it was a bit different. The main difference is that a radar is built around the idea of its visualization but the registry is a simple “phone book” that is displayed in a similar way to the radar. Usually, the radar’s main purpose is to help you orientate yourself in the world of technologies, while the registry is more about sharing the experience and only its visualization is aiming to help with the orientation.
The Technology Registry is still a young concept in Quadient, and I’m going to write down the experience with it after some time. Until then, feel free to re-use any tooling I have made around the idea and I would be thankful for any feedback in comments.
