tech-radarlisted

# 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.**