What is the Tech Radar?

The Tech Radar is a list of technologies, complemented by an assessment result, called ring assignment.

Assessment rings

Service360 uses four rings with the following semantics:

• ADOPT — Technologies we have high confidence in to serve our purpose, also in large scale. Technologies with a usage culture in our production environment, low risk and recommended to be widely used.
• TRIAL — Technologies that we have seen work with success in project work to solve a real problem; first serious usage experience that confirm benefits and can uncover limitations. TRIAL technologies are slightly more risky; some engineers in our organization walked this path and will share knowledge and experiences.
• ASSESS — Technologies that are promising and have clear potential value-add for us; technologies worth to invest some research and prototyping efforts in to see if it has impact. ASSESS technologies have higher risks; they are often brand new and highly unproven in our organisation. You will find some engineers that have knowledge in the technology and promote it, you may even find teams that have started a prototyping effort.
• HOLD — Technologies not recommended to be used for new projects. Technologies that we think are not (yet) worth to (further) invest in. HOLD technologies should not be used for new projects, but usually can be continued for existing projects.

Quadrants / Technology type

Original ThoughtWorks TechRadar assesses technologies in 4 “quadrants”:

• Techniques
• Platforms
• Tools
• Languages & Frameworks

Though this approach is great for a map of industry-wide technologies it might be too high-level for a company to apply.

Service360 TechRadar does not define tech types and leaves it completely up to you. It is not even necessary to stay in 4 quadrants. It is completely up to you how many of those do you want to specify for your landscape.

For example Zalando uses (at the time of writing) the following quandrants:

• Frameworks
• Infrastructure
• Data management
• Languages

How to

Service360 suggests to use repository for storing tech radar data. Quadrants are implemented as folders on the root level of the repository. Tech radar entry is a markdown file inside of any root level folder. Folders on the second level from the root of the repo are ignored and can be used for whatever purposes (for example for archive/images/supporting materials).

You can have a look at the example of the properly structured TechRadar repository.

Tech radar entry

Each tech radar entry keeps track of a history of one tech in your landscape.

Tech radar entry must follow a special file semantics to be recognized as a tech radar entry.

Tech radar entry may (and we suggest to do so) contain a historical track of the status of the technology separated by the --- delimiter. While you of course can keep only the latest state of the tech in the tech radar entry and use git history to track the changes, we would recommend against it. History of the tech inside of the landscape is a very important and relevant piece of information helping to see how tech was assessed (and possibly to leave a space for the reassessment).

Example:

# Technology name

- Status: ADOPT|TRIAL|ASSESS|HOLD
- Date: 26.07.2020
- Alias: Tech1, Tech2, Tech3
- Tags: Tag1, Tag2, Tag3

Here goes free text describing application of the technology in your
tech landscape. Possible use-cases, caveats, etc.

---

- Status: ADOPT|TRIAL|ASSESS|HOLD
- Date: 26.07.2020 

Here goes free text describing application of the technology in your
tech landscape. Possible use-cases, caveats, etc.

---

... 

Technically there are only 2 mandatory fields for tech radar entry: technology name and status. Date, tags, alias, and description are completely optional, thou we would recommend filling those also.

Alias

Alias field is used to specify technology alias names in case the same technology is specified with the different names in different service passports. For example: AWS SQS, SQS. Or for merging tech versions: Golang, Go, Golang1.12, Golang1.11.

While parsing service passport technologies are compared against tech radar in a case insensitive manner, so there is no need to specify different aliases which differ only by the letter case. Service360 treats SQS and sqs (or Golang and golang) as one thing.

Tags

TechRadar provides two ways to categorise technologies: Quadrant and Tags. Quadrant (or Technology type) is the main categorisation. One technology can be related to one and only one Quadrant. And one technology can be be marked with multiple tags. Those tags are used to filter technologies in the interface.

We recommend to use tags for marking technologies wiht usecases with more precision than Quadrant does.

For example AWS ElasticSearch can be located in the Quadrant Infrastucture and marked with tags search, aws, elastic, saas