What is the Tech Radar?

The ableneo Tech Radar is a list of technologies, complemented by an assessment result, called ring assignment. We use four rings with the following semantics:

• ADOPTTechnologies we have high confidence in to serve our purpose, also in large scale. Technologies with a usage culture in our ableneo production environment, low risk and recommended to be widely used.

  During evaluation, ADOPT technologies are challenged whether thay are still valid and good enough to be used for future projects.

• TRIALTechnologies that we have seen work with success in some project (not necessarily ours) to solve a real problem. Or such technology have high potential to fill some gap in our strategic technology portfolio. Therefore, we want to intentionally use these items in projects to have serious usage experience confirming benefits and can uncover limitations. TRIAL technologies are slightly more risky.

  During radar evalutation, TRIAL items are carefuly judged on their value/benefits to risk/usage dificulty ratio. This via the shared feedback of our engineers that used them.

• ASSESSTechnologies 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.

• RETIRETechnologies not recommended to be used for new projects. Technologies that we think are not (yet) worth to (further) invest in. RETIRE technologies should not be used for new projects, but usually can be continued for existing projects.

  RETIRE items are usually identified during the Radar evaluation process from the ADOPT / TRIAL that were tested with negative experience.

What is the purpose?

The Tech Radar is a tool to support and inspire our internal engineering teams, our partners and customers on technology selection that reflects our experience, know-how and technology vision. Also it helps us to think of, plan, and make decisions on our tech strategy. For us to stay strong, up-to-date in competence and efficient and value effective for our customers. Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks, our Tech Radar sets out the changes in technologies that are interesting in software development — changes that we think our engineering teams should pay attention to and consider using in their projects.

How do we maintain it?

In ableneo Tech Radar is maintained by internal tech communities per each of our key technology areas. Changes are considered/done on regular (qarterly) basis for the radar to always reflects and summarizes our present technology status and also our collective vision towards the short to mid-term future.

Acknowledgment

Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks, ableneo tech radar is a fork of Neofonie tech-radar Github project that roots in Zalando Tech Radar.
Our credits goes to generous developer's work of these projects!