Pecha Kucha slidedeck to outline what a Technology Radar is and its dynamics. Strands of my personal radar creation process included. Notes contains more on concepts on slides.
Technology Radar - ThoughtWorks Advisory Board - Latest October 2012 - Aim to produce every 6 months Emerging Technologies & Trends in the market today
Emerging Technologies & Trends relevant to me! Context: - Career - Personal - Contribute to the team I am working with - Provide leading edge and best practice based advice for client Quadrants/Rings/Blips
Quadrants - Techniques - Tools - Platforms - Programming Languages & Frameworks Crude categorization - Rings are far more important
Elements of the Software Development Process - Continuous Delivery - WIP Limits - Continuous Integration - Micro Services - Pomodoro Technique (Illustrated)
Components (Database) Software Development Tools (Version Control) Categories of Tools (Polygot Persistence) - Concordion - Liquibase - Gradle - Sonar Tend to focus on tools that align with the techniques I am interested in
Things that we build software development on... - Android - Node JS - OpenStack - MongoDB - Vert.x
Tend to be frameworks for me rather than Languages – Polygot Programming... - Clojure - DSLs - DropWizard - Grails - EmberJS
Rings Stage in the adoption lifecycle the 'blips' are at... Radar...closer to you, bearing down...more important etc.. - Hold - Assess - Trial - Adopt Lots of discussion around
Things getting attention but that are either.. ...not ready for assessment ...or ...flawed and should be discouraged and we/I want you to stop doing - Maven - Java Portal Servers - Exhaustive Browser Testing - WordPress(!)
Things that you should look at but not necessarily trial yet....tend to be cutting edge (trial in sandboxes not client projects) - Polygot Persistence - D3 - BiqQuery - Require.js
Things that should be trialled to see if they fit for your own use...typically comfortable from assessing them and ready for use...but some people are cautious.... - Continuous Delivery - Robolectric - Redis - Angular JS/Knockout
Things that you should be doing and are ready now... ...for me this is about practicing and experimenting with the tools, whilst clients should use... (Step Ahead) …'we will laugh at you in the pub if not using these'.. - Continuous Integration - Puppet/Sonar - Node JS - JSON/Geb
Blips in the ThoughtWorks radar have a limited life...usually 2 radars... Yet to assess with my radar..but blips that are not important to me..such as Continuous Integration don't appear.... ...blips may move or even be renamed....Maybe after widespread adoption the blips are sucked into the black hole in the middle of the radar!
...lots of uses...different criteria Personal....direction, career, goals etc. (Your interests) Team...shared understanding, goals, objectives etc. (Meet the team needs) Organizations...shared understanding, strategic, eliminate risk etc...(Meet the Organizations needs)
Brainstorm...ideas All and everything...lately have created an area on my wall where I post potential new blips for the radar...Bas and Docker added this week! Tried to categorise by quadrant – next time will categorise by status ...tried to cover quadrants... Had ring focus clear...
Started to organise by quadrant into the rings I felt the 'blips' should appear in on my initial radar... ..enabled me to move around and even put stuff out (at end) that I was using and would not get value out of spending more time on... ...will be doing rings based colours next time, so will be reversed of what I did this time...
..wrote them up...used a Github project as basis for the radar... ...shared my radar on Github page ...and wrote a blog post on my personal website about the journey including more info on the radar and the process... ...including links to Neal Fords talk on building a personal radar...
I view the radar as a vital component in helping me to continuously improve (Kaizen) From the process that is used to create it, to the way it is shared, to the use of blips on the radar....each has a role to play in improving skills and capabilities.... ...as a consultant keeping abreast of trends is essential...setting your own trends is taking it to the next level...
Hopefully you have some ideas now for the use of radars....yourself, with the team or even organizations... ...could the team provide radar facilitation... ...can we support teams in helping them with items on the radar... ...should we have a team radar... ...if so...quadrants? …. Thanks