devpopol/tech-radar

A tool to help teams make the right technology choices

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Zalando Tech Radar

The Zalando Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support teams to pick the best technologies for new projects. Based on the ideas 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.

This repository shares:

• the visualization of the latest Zalando Tech Radar release, including a short summary of what it includes and how we are using it;

• code for generating the Tech Radar visualization from a simple tabular representation (tsv). The visualization code is based on the Protovis JavaScript visualization library and a fork of Brett Dargan's Tech Radar visualization tool. We've optimized the layout to make the chart and explanations fit on a double-sided sheet of A4 paper.

Cool. How can I make my own?

Create a Google doc with the following columns:

• Technology (e.g. "Hystrix")
• Quadrant (e.g. "Platforms & Infrastructure")
• [optional] Comments (e.g. "lib for fault tolerance")
• Score as a float between 2.0 and -2.0 (e.g. "1.8")
• [optional] Number of votes, for internal bookkeeping
• [optional] Consensus score, for internal bookkeeping
• Skip — set to true if entry should not be visualized on chart

Then follow the instructions below.

Note: the score-to-ring mapping we use is not linear:

	score    2 ----- 1.5 --------------- 0 ---------- -1 ---------- -2
  	 ring      ADOPT          TRIAL          ASSESS         HOLD

How to generate a new chart

1. run gem install liquid if necessary
2. on the master google doc, select File > Download as > Tab-separated values and store as data/year_month.tsv
3. open data/year_month.tsv and delete the first line (which contains the headers)
4. run ./transform.rb to generate a new radar_data.js
5. open index.html in your browser to inspect the result
6. repeat the last two steps until you're happy with the arrangement :)
7. check everything in
8. merge master branch into gh-pages
9. push gh-pages to publish the new radar

Note: the last .tsv file (by lexical order) in data/ is visualized. The next-to-last .tsv file (if it exists) is used to find out which blips have moved, relative to the previous radar.

License

Apache 2.0 — same as bdargan/techradar