What is the Tech Radar?

The Harborn Tech Radar is a list of technologies, complemented by an assessment result, called ring assignment. We use four rings with the following semantics:

• CORE — Technologies we have high confidence in to serve our purpose and we consider our core technologies. We are, or aim to, specialists in these technologies. CORE technologies are considered to be safe choices within Harborn, as long as the use case fits the technology of course. Knowledge about the technology is widespread and the technology has been used successfully several times. We believe the CORE technologies have a significant impact on our projects and teams.
• COMPETENT — Technologies that we have seen work with success in project work to solve a real problem. These technologies may be on their way to CORE or technologies we consider useful and sensible choices for real projects, but where we do not aim to be or consider ourselves specialists (yet) or do consider the impact of these technologies to be significantly less than typical CORE technologies.
• EXPLORE — Technologies that are promising and have clear potential value-add for us; technologies worth to invest some research and prototyping efforts in to see if it has impact. EXPLORE technologies have higher risks; they are often brand new and highly unproven in our organisation. You will find some engineers that have knowledge in the technology and promote it, you may even find teams that have started a prototyping effort or actual implementations in non-critical features of real projects.
• MAINTAIN — Technologies not recommended to be used for new projects. We often use these technologies in existing projects and keep our skillset on these high. However, we believe newer technologies are often a better choice for new projects.

Tech Radar Quadrants

We have created 7 individual quadrants within our Tech Radar. This makes it easy to navigate the Tech Radar because the quadrants categorize the technologies used within Harborn. We use the following seven quadrants:

• Languages — The programming languages we use for our projects.
• Frameworks — The frameworks built upon the programming languages we use to structure, secure and accelerate development.
• DevOps — The technologies we use to provide reliable, secure and scalable Infrastructure for our projects.
• Data & AI — Databases, business intelligence, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies we use in our projects.
• UX — The technologies our designers use to create designs and improve handovers and collaboration with our (front end) developers.
• CMS — The content management systems that we implement within our projects.
• Marketing — The technologies our marketeers use within or in collaboration with our projects to optimize conversion.

What is the purpose?

The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support Engineering teams at Harborn to pick the best technologies for new projects; it provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to reflect on technology decisions and continuously evolve our technology landscape. Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks and the open source tech radar of Zalando, 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 use in their projects.

How do we maintain it?

The Tech Radar is maintained by our Technical Leads — who facilitate and drive the technology selection discussions at Harborn across the teams. Assignment of technologies to rings is the outcome of discussions with all our developers, engineers, ux-ers and any other Harborner who wishes to join. The Tech Radar is open for contribution for all teams at Harborn and depends on their active participation to share lessons learned, pitfalls, and contribute to good practices on using the technologies.