any interesting decision in in software development as in most things of life is not a straightforward thing there's many factors to take into account you know the old joke is you know the answer to every question that you ask a consultant is it depends and that's true because any interesting problem the answer has to begin with it depends and then you want to make sure that people understand what it depends on and they can make an informed decision saying well these are the factors I've got to take to account this is the context I'm in which is very individual to me and I'm going lying that to make a good decision our aim is to help people make good decisions well when I first became CTO in roughly 20072 2008 I felt it important that I had a group of technologists that could advise me and so I formed this thing called the technology Advisory Board and one of the early questions we got from the organization was what's the list of hot technologies that you'd like us to sell and so we took one of the sessions of an early meeting of the tab the technology Advisory Board to sort of brainstorm what that list might look like I can't remember exactly how things flowed but we just had a fairly loose agenda in the first few meetings and her ta at the time technical assistant at the time Darren Smith um came up with this idea of well we want to exchange lessons about what we're doing what kinds of techniques are we using that we're finding is good what kind of tools do we use that we find are good um and he just came up with the idea of capturing that through this radar metaphor said well let let's let's think about this and from the perspective of uh Technologies moving becoming more critical and then we came up with the quadrants to allow us to kind of organize the different Technologies and that's how the radar was born so I think what's hard about representing the technology that you bring into the radar is partly it's just really fast-paced right so we do this every 6 months and there's just a lot of changes the choices are becoming greater and so trying to source that and also trying to get realistic advice about all of these different things and I think that's where as a consultancy thoughtworks has an advantage over say a bank or a manufacturer because we work across Banks and manufacturers and we work in India and China and Brazil and Australia and so we work around the globe as well and so we can compare experiences with technology across domains across technology Stacks across the globe a lot of the traffic was dominated by vendors giving their Spiel and that was part of why we wanted the radar internally to say say no this is what we've learned and we wanted to be very much based on this is stuff that we've done we've played with we and we don't have a bias of any kind particularly um so and we're going to tell it how we see it we started out with languages tools techniques and platforms relatively early we we morphed the languages to also include Frameworks so those are the four uh the four quadrants and then we have an adop in which is something that we are very confident should be considered a sensible default it doesn't mean you should always use it because of course contexts differ and all the rest of it but most of the time given that kind of thing you want to be using this that's a significant step up from trial the trial ring on the other hand is for us a strong signal internally to tell teams there are other teams in thoughtworks who have used this technology successful it is not only opinion anymore it is something that has proven itself and it doesn't of course work for all Technologies but the general rule of thumb is we have to have used it in production if we try a technology and we play with it and we're unsure we would actually leave it in assess and that's a little bit more like the wild west these are things that well gee that looks interesting or this solves a real problem but it could be very early they might still be in beta um we haven't really used it in anger on enough projects to have a really firm opinion about this um but we think it's interesting and we think it's got the potential to be something that could be important in the future and then we have the holder ring and the tab and now Doppler the group that is currently creating the the the radar these days they love the hold ring this is where we tell people you know you really shouldn't be doing that so the hold ring the the official word is proceed with caution this is something that we say yeah it's got some real flaws and you got to be careful about this but it actually goes all the way to us don't go anywhere near this with a 10t pole maybe it's because it's too new maybe it's because people just continue to not use things properly um or maybe it's that we just don't think the approach is right at all um and so that's the basic structure of the radar and at some point or other we decided hey we might as well make that public because foreworks is habit very important to to me and to all of us is that we we don't we we we give away our secret Source we tell everybody our secret Source um and so I said hey if we've discovered these really important Vital Information about what we're doing on projects let's tell everybody so we did see thought workk stands for re revolutionizing the technology industry right uh we have been at the Forefront of the agile movement devops microservices micr frontends data mesh you know thought workers are always the ones who are pushing the limit when it comes to embracing technology even when we were small we thought we had something to offer in the way of this is how to create software more effectively more efficiently make it easier to maintain have it deliver value more quickly and the radar is one of the ways that we use to talk about how you do that there's four key phases in creating the radar the first one is the blip collection the second one is the curation of the radar where we reduce the amount of blips to the final count in the publication the third one is the writing of the actual texts on the radar and the fourth one then is production which includes translation and then we get it all packaged up and then it launches we have a radar so we we get our submissions from everywhere um and that and we do that intentionally so we do it in terms of like every region every country we try and get make sure that there's representation and that a session has been run or people have had the opportunity to submit we also do some horizontal stuff as well right so we have like AI expertise and you know data platform expertise we have um you know modernization and Cloud expertise we have front end and mobile and um and that that's how we end up with the sheer volume of of inputs then during the course of the meeting the first stage in the meeting is to basically go through all of these blips one by one and say okay what do we think about this blip the people who are have harvested the blip will describe what they know about it people will offer their opinions sometimes somebody from another region will say oh yeah we've come across this and have some comments in there and back and forth and we decide whether it goes on the radar or off the radar then once we got the first pass we normally sitting then at around 130 150 blips and we want to get it down to about 100 for the radar so the next stage is the culling I should point out we have this very nice um voting and discussion process where in order to speak you raise your hand with a yellow with a yellow card in it to say I want to speak and Rebecca who chairs the meeting keeps note of the order and we go through in sequence and you're not expected to speak out of turn which looks really well cuz it allows the clock quiet people to come out then when she calls for a vote um we have red cards and green cards Green Card means in favor putting it on the radar red card means no and then if you still feel we haven't talked enough about it and you want something to say more you keep your yellow card up and that's the kind of saying no I don't want to vote yet I want to say more so we do that both in the initial pass and then again in the co um we will again do the same process and then once we've done through the and we got it closer to 100 to a more bearable level we have a final stage which is called the Lifeboat and that's where somebody had one of their blips whether it was shot down in the beginning whether it didn't survive the call but they get to they get to give it a Lifeboat and say okay let's try this one more time often it doesn't sway the room uh but sometimes it does okay let's try a boat okay valant effort yeah I me we talked about it I mean the radar is opinionated and even in a group of 20 roughly 20 technologists from thoughtworks who share common history working for the same company having the same process getting the same input we don't always come to the same conclusion sometimes it can be Regional because certain Technologies are used differently in different regions but sometimes it is also that the unique perspective that each person brings leads them based on the same facts to a different conclusion there's a lot of respect in the room for each other as Leaders um and I think the thing that works about the way that we put this together is it goes back to that strong opinions weekly held so like people put a lot of effort into the research of the things that they want to represent um and work on getting a succinct message across there are many different ways to use the radar as an individual you can use it as a guide for your career development as an organization using our radar again is a guide to where should we be looking at leadership development where should we be taking our technology stack are there ways that we can improve the way our software development organizations work uh but there's also something that we recommend for organizations which which is for them to build their own radar and we have an open source package and lots of materials uh that would allow organizations to do that more so than the radar itself that comes out of the build your own radar process uh the discussion is where the real value is because now people understand why technology is the way it is and the organization why people are pushing things in a in a particular direction what are the problems that we're trying to solve so there are lots of different ways to use the radar um even though it's just one document as a CTO uh and as any technology leader will tell you it is really hard to keep up with this industry so for me personally it's like a great opportunity at least twice a year to just find out what is going on on the ground with our development teams what's working for them what's not working for them what they're struggling with which may or may not turn into you know specific strategies that we have around capability or around you know how we go to market um and so that's really helped for me in in my role another characteristic of the radar though that is important given the proliferation of Technologies is we make no claims to be comprehensive we cover the things that we have experienced with the things that we have seen um and so when you start to talk about something like AI where there is so much hype out there having something that is vendor agnostic platform agnostic the only criteria for getting on the radar is for us to have something to say that we think will be useful to someone who is evaluating whether or not to use a particular tool technology platform any anybody can put out how to but I think it takes a lot of effort and nuance and experience to put out when and why it's because we are extracting this from like 400 submissions from across the globe to filter it down after a bunch of conversations of about why and why not if anybody were to know this process that how Democratic it is how empowering it is for the people on the ground to be able to contribute I think that's very important for me as a Doppler for the rest of the world to know that we put in our heart and soul to make this artifact because we believe that it's important to share our experiences with the world and uh revolutionize the technology industry