The Tech Radar – A neat way to visualize your organization’s engineering technology stack

A little background:

I am a software engineering manager that leads the development team for an international retail company. Our IT department spans a few technology groups that work with various parts of the business. As these teams began to grow I needed a way to document the technology choices we have made.

Why we needed this:

It was becoming hard for me to remember everything in my head. A growing organization meant that there were more people working with more technologies. I needed to understand their purpose and determine if it fit well within the big picture. 

The tech radar gave a high level overview of the technologies used and a single place to reference. Each value leads to a more detailed page that talks about the specifics behind each.  I documented where we used this technology in the company and why we chose it over other similar options. 

This also provided a great resource for recruiting new employees. We were able to give a quick overview of the types of technologies we are working with and testing. 

It also was a useful resource to the leadership team. They could see the various technologies we work with and form a better understanding of how each one applied to the business.

How we did it:

The visualization we used is an open source package made by Zalando. They maintain a GitHub repository for it at:  https://github.com/zalando/tech-radar. The idea behind the tech radar was made popular by ThoughtWorks, a technology consultancy company.