by Priit Liivak, Head of Engineering, June 21, 2018
We will make the full results available on Nortal’s website in July, but can already say that most were in line with what we had expected. Techniques like code reviews and continuous delivery showed far more favor than working with no project manager or inventing from scratch. The high popularity of the Spring Boot framework was also anticipated.
One surprise for us, however, was how divided opinion was over the Typescript language, with some participants recommending adopting it and others cautioning developers to avoid it.
This difference underscores a critical point about Technology Radar results. Namely, that they should always be taken as a measure of the specific sentiments of a specific group at a specific time. They are not an absolute guide to what you should use in your situation. It’s still important to choose the right tools for the task.
Nortal’s Technology Radar strategy is based on that used by the tech company ThoughtWorks, but in this case it came with an important difference. While theirs voiced the opinions of a closed community of their internal experts, Nortal’s was the first to open up the process, gauging sentiment among a large number of developers in a conference setting.
We welcomed all conference participants to add techniques, technologies and tools to the radar in one of four layers:
To kick things off and elicit an initial response, we added some items to the board. When someone felt a technology was misjudged, the item was duplicated into their recommended layer. Participants also had a chance to express their approval regarding a specific placement of any given item on the board.
Which tools Estonian developers consider high-flyers, hopefuls, flops or has-beens? 600 people had their say @Nortal_AS Tech Radar exercise during @GeekOutEE
There was an expectation that votes be accompanied by a short explanation. Some universally awful items were followed by a laugh and controversial ones with a proper discussion. Quite often, attendees discovered disliked technologies in both the adopt and trial layers and provided solid feedback as to why they disagreed. As expected, the senior attendees were far more insightful — but the juniors’ eagerness to learn added quite a few new items to the board.
The main purpose of this assembly was to network, help people voice their opinions on technologies they like or dislike and perhaps even find something to test-drive in their upcoming projects. In retrospect, we feel that the Tech Radar exercise was a great way for conference attendees and us to keep our minds sharp in between the awesome talks.
As said, we’ll make full results available in July. Stay tuned!
In 2016, we built a Nortal Tech Radar to map our developers’ opinionated view on the technological landscape at the time. You can see the results here.