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Technology Radar

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Technology Radar

Jan 23, 2025

Technology Radar is a powerful visualisation tool for categorisation of technologies, adoption across organisation, usage etc.

It is very useful for organisations to manage technology portfolio, avoiding duplicate technical and legal evaluation, improving risk profile, etc. From engineer’s perspective, it can help with onboarding, knowledge transfer and avoiding duplicate efforts.

Technology Radar origins come from Thoughtworks, a technology consultancy group. They popularised this format and have been publishing bi-annually its radar for past 15 years.

Now, let’s dive in into structure.

The radar has four quadrants (categories): Techniques, Tools, Platforms and Languages & Frameworks.

Each quadrants has four rings which indicates the state of the technology (or blip to use same terminology): ADOPT, TRIAL, ASSESS or HOLD. Logically, technologies closer to the centre have bigger impact and importance to the organisation.

ADOPT

Technology has been proven as mature and can be recommended for current and future projects. Practically it can mean it has been battle-tested within production environments, there is comprehensive documentation and institutional know-how available to adopt it organisation wide.

TRIAL

Technology has been proven useful for specific real-world use cases, however there are still risks and open questions to explore before full adoption. Practically it can mean it is being battle-tested within production environments of selected services, with different loads and/or within different architectures.

ASSESS

Technology has potential to solve specific issues and/or improve current services and it is worth to further explore and evaluate. Practically it can mean it is being tested within sandboxed environments, using synthetic datasets and controlled settings.

HOLD

Technology has been marked as deprecated and/or not recommended for usage for various possible reasons: technical issues like performance, resiliency, etc., legal, cost, etc.

Each technology needs to be properly described in some structured format. At minimum that would be: Name, Category (Quadrant) and Status. Optionally, providing following information can be also helpful:

  • License
  • Subject-matter experts within organisation
  • Links to source code (where applicable), documentation and examples
  • Examples of in-house services using technology
  • Constraints and/or Risks
  • Additional resources

Organisation usually have a process that describes how and when technology changes status and required stakeholders for the decision. Practically, having more inclusive and transparent process where everyone can propose or view a change, can keep radar up to date.

Finally, to the tooling:

That’s pretty much all.

Technology Radar is a rather simple but powerful item in Staff+ toolkit.

Examples of Technology Radars in the wild: