Technology Radar Vol. 26: key recommendations
More than 5 years ago I was fortunate to find a resource that has helped me in a great way to keep myself updated in an integral way in everything that corresponds to this wide and diverse technological universe.
Thoughtworks Technology Radar has been one of my supports to maintain the spirit of advisor and innovator that I have always had both with my clients in different industries and with the different work teams to which I have belonged.
Having one (Martin Fowler) of the precursors of the Agil Manifest on their side makes Thoughtworks an insightful place where really useful things come from.
In Volume 26 of this Technology Radar, the first release of 2022, we can see Thoughtworks still focused on how Open Source software affects the entire technology ecosystem so they are constantly testing, adopting, and even enhancing different open source projects they rely on.
I would like to do a small summary with key recommendations on each quadrant to help you onboard this huge repository of technologies that you can start testing in your organization.
Tools
- tfsec: tfsec is an open-source project from Aqua Security that comes as the first tool to Adopt that helps out with DevSecOps practices when you are using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code. There are multiple ways to install tfsec and it’s really easy to execute and detect potential vulnerabilities inside your Terraform files.
Languages and Frameworks
- SwiftUI: It’s an awesome library developed by Apple to allow developers to create cross-apple-platform apps. Even though this library was introduced in 2019 it has been receiving important improvements to make it a winner framework you definitely need to adopt if you are into Mobile Development.
- Testcontainers: Continuing with the DevOps trend, this useful JavaScript library is widely recommended for creating a reliable environment for running tests. Currently, Testcontainers is being used for great products like Elastic, Instana, Skyscanner, and Jenkins. Basically, Testcontainers lets you create a custom Dockerfile to model test dependencies of different types of databases, queuing technologies, cloud services, and UI testing dependencies like web browsers.
Platforms
In this volume, there are no recommendations within the Adopt ring however if we go down to Trial ring we could find different platforms that are worth a trial:
- Azure DevOps
- CircleCI
- Github Actions
- Gitlab CI/CD
- eBPF
Techniques
- Four Key Metrics: Since 2014 DORA and Google have been developing tirelessly this awesome State of DevOps Report where they have been collecting testimonials from thousands of worldwide companies on how they are managing the software delivery process. In this volume they recommend adopting this ‘4 Key Metrics’ approach in order to measure what is your software delivery performance based on these metrics:
- Change Lead Time
- Deployment Frequency
- Mean Time to Restore
- Change Fail Percentage
Additionally, Google has developed an interesting tool in order to help companies to keep track of these metrics easily in a well-designed Dashboard to monitor how these metrics are performing over time.
- Single Team Remote Wall: Last 2 years distributed remote teams have been increasing worldwide and it’s required a single common visual space where all team members could have common information additional to repositories and platforms. The remote wall is a hub or an integration place where everyone could easily find statuses, tasks, or extremely useful information for the team. Even when the Radar doesn't recommend a tool for that I can mention a very useful tool to cover this topic. It’s Mural, a visual collaboration tool that helps teams to work on the same page in real-time.
I hope these key recommendations could help you grow in some way, from my side I will be testing a lot of different tools from the Radar to keep surfing over the tech wave.
