How to use the Agreena Data Team Technology Radar
What is the Tech Radar?
The Agreena Data Technology Radar is a list of technologies, complemented by an assessment result, called ring assignment. We use four rings with the following semantics:
- 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.
- 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.
- ADOPT — Technologies we have high confidence in to serve our purpose, also in large scale. Technologies with a usage culture in our Agreena production environment, low risk and recommended to be widely used.
- 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.
We also include a category for REMOVED which is when something has been removed from the radar, either due to being in HOLD status for some time, or because it is not useful to present it on the radar any more. This usually includes a description of why it was removed.
What is the purpose?
The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support Data teams at Agreena to pick the best technologies for new projects; it provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to reflect on technology decisions and continuously evolve our technology landscape. 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 use in their projects.
How do we maintain it?
The Tech Radar is maintained by our Engineers and Scientists on the Agreena Data Team — who facilitate and drive the technology selection discussions at Agreena across the tech Community. Assignment of technologies to rings is the outcome of ring change proposals, which are discussed and voted on. The Tech Radar is open for contribution for all teams at Agreena and depends on their active participation to share lessons learned, pitfalls, and contribute to good practices on using the technologies.
Quadrants
These have been inspired by the ThoughtWorks radar and the Element84 Geospatial radar. See those radars for guidance on where to add new items.
The different quadrants map to areas on the visual radar that align the different items:
- Languages & Frameworks — The frameworks that power our products.
- Data Storage and Access — Technologies used in data processing, storage, and to make this data available within the internal company boundaries.
- Tooling — Any tooling, internal or external that we use as part of our workflows.
- Platform & Infrastructure — Systems that are deployed on our infrastructure. Typically maintained by Platform or the Data Engineering team
Acknowledgements
This website is based on an open-source project from AOE. Contributions and source code of the AOE Tech Radar can be found on GitHub: AOE Tech Radar on GitHub.