Tech Radar

---
name: tech-radar
description: Maintain a tech radar that sorts technologies into adopt, trial, assess, and hold against a real evidence bar, and pairs each adoption with a sunset. Use when an organization needs a shared, current view of which tools and techniques to reach for and which to retire.
---

# 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.