Tech Radar

Tech radar

A tech radar, in the form ThoughtWorks made common, places technologies into four rings so a whole organization shares one opinion about what to reach for. It decays into a list of things someone thought were cool: entries with no evidence behind the ring, nothing ever moving to hold, and adoptions that quietly pile new tools on top of the old without ever removing anything. A radar earns its keep by having a bar and by retiring as deliberately as it adopts.

Method

1. Sort every entry into exactly one of four rings. Adopt: proven here, use it by default. Trial: worth using on a real project with a fallback. Assess: worth a spike to understand, not yet a bet. Hold: do not start anything new with it. The ring is a recommendation for action, not a rating of how interesting a thing is.
2. Require evidence to move inward, and raise the bar per ring. Assess needs a credible reason to look. Trial needs at least one team that shipped something real with it. Adopt needs multiple teams, production mileage, and a story for operating it. "A senior engineer likes it" moves nothing on its own.
3. Pair every adopt with a hold. When you bless a new tool, name what it replaces and move that predecessor to hold in the same review. Adoption without retirement is how you accumulate three message queues and four ways to do config. The radar's discipline is subtraction, not just addition.
4. Put a named sponsor and a date on each entry. Someone owns the recommendation and the evidence behind it, and every entry carries when it last moved. An unsponsored, undated blip is folklore. If no one will put their name on an adopt, it is not one.
5. Re-run the radar on a fixed cadence and let things move. Quarterly or twice a year, revisit every ring. Things graduate inward with evidence, and things that disappointed move outward toward hold. A radar where nothing ever demotes is a monument, not a working document.
6. Write a sentence of rationale per blip, including the risks. Why this ring, what it is good for, and where it bites. The value is in the reasoning a reader can weigh, not the position on a chart. A ring with no "why" is an opinion asking to be obeyed.

Signals

• Could someone justify each adopt entry with evidence stronger than enthusiasm?
• When something entered adopt, did anything actually move to hold to make room?
• Does every blip have a sponsor and a date it last changed rings?

Boundaries

A radar records recommendations; it does not make the architectural decision for a specific system, which belongs in a design doc weighing that context. Ring definitions and cadence are conventions you set; the point is a consistent evidence bar, not copying another company's exact rings.