sairam0424 Technology Radar
When this skill activates
This skill activates when the team needs to evaluate, adopt, trial, or retire a technology. It provides a structured governance framework for technology decisions using the four-ring radar model, ensuring technologies are assessed objectively and lifecycle-managed with clear migration paths.
Mandatory actions when this skill is active
Before
- Identify the technology under evaluation — Name, category (language, framework, tool, platform, technique), and the problem it claims to solve.
- Determine current ring placement — Where does this technology sit today in the organization's radar? (Adopt / Trial / Assess / Hold / Not yet tracked)
- Gather context — Who is requesting the evaluation? What project would use it? What does it replace or complement?
During
Apply the Four Rings model:
- Adopt — Proven in production, recommended as default choice. Teams should use this unless there is a compelling reason not to.
- Trial — Worth pursuing on a specific project with clear boundaries. Team has committed to evaluate with production-quality implementation.
- Assess — Worth exploring to understand potential. Research spikes, prototypes, and conference talks. No production use yet.
- Hold — Proceed with caution. Do not start new projects with this technology. Existing usage should plan migration path.
Evaluate against criteria:
- Community size — Contributors, GitHub stars trend, Stack Overflow activity, corporate backing stability.
- Maintenance activity — Release frequency, issue response time, bus factor of maintainers, funding model sustainability.
- Breaking change frequency — Semver discipline, migration tooling quality, deprecation communication practices.
- Performance benchmarks — Relevant benchmarks compared to current stack and alternatives. Avoid synthetic-only benchmarks.
- Hiring pool — Can you hire people who know this? Is the talent market growing or shrinking? Training cost for existing team.
- Ecosystem maturity — Library availability, tooling quality, IDE support, documentation completeness, testing story.
Governance rules:
- Quarterly radar review — Reassess all Trial and Assess items every quarter.
- Trial time-box — Maximum 3 months. At end: promote to Adopt, extend with justification, or move to Hold.
- Clear migration paths — Every Hold decision must include a recommended alternative and migration timeline estimate.
- Retire explicitly — Technologies leaving Adopt must have deprecation plan with timeline and responsible team.
Risk assessment:
- What happens if this technology is abandoned by maintainers?
- What is the switching cost if we adopt and later need to leave?
- Does this create a single-vendor dependency?
- Are there regulatory/compliance implications?
After
- Update the radar — Record the ring placement decision with date, rationale, and evaluation evidence.
- Communicate the decision — Share with engineering org via radar changelog. Include: what changed, why, and what teams should do differently.
- Set review date — Schedule next evaluation based on ring (Adopt: annually, Trial: 3 months, Assess: 6 months, Hold: review migration progress quarterly).
Self-check before task completion
- Technology placed in exactly one ring with clear justification
- All six evaluation criteria scored or explicitly marked not-applicable
- Risk assessment completed including abandonment and switching cost
- Migration path defined if placing in Hold ring
- Time-box set if placing in Trial ring
- Radar changelog entry written
- Next review date scheduled
- Decision communicated to affected teams