The Westwing Technology Radar

Westwing is a growing company with a tech team that rapidly grew from a few dozen to around 270 team members in a span of a few years. When a tech department grows rapidly from a “startup” to a scaled up setup, it’s easy to lose track of the initiatives, practices and especially technologies present in the department. So, one of our governance initiatives was to identify all the technologies currently in use and also the ones that we want to keep investing in. To do so, we’ve decided to use a so called “Technology Radar”

Wait, a tech what?

If you are in technology you’re probably familiar with the “technology radar” concept, in case you’re not, we can describe it as a tool to track technology and its use in the world or, in our case, inside an organisation. The tool is coming from the work of a well known and innovative technology company called Thoughtworks, and it’s used by the software developers community to stay informed, keep track of technology changes and understand new trends (if you’re interested, you can read more about it here).

The radar basically consists of two main elements, the quadrants and the rings:

• A quadrant is a categorisation of a technology (e.g. a “Programming language” or a “Tool”)
• A ring is a figurative concentric circle, and the more a technology is closer to the center, the more “safe” it is to use it

Visually it’s pretty easy to grasp (that’s the latest version of the official Thoughtworks radar and each point represents a technology)

The Westwing tech radar

You might wonder, why does a company like Westwing needs an internal technology radar?

There are multiple reasons:

• As mentioned above, a rapidly growing company could easily lose track of the technologies used in its tech team, so the first purpose that it serves is to assess the current technology landscape inside the company.
• The world of tech changes fast and it’s very central to our business, so as a tech organisation we need to define a tech strategy and the tech radar is a good tool to map one.
• With a tech radar we can easily explain to a potential candidate what’s our technology landscape and being clear on what is our vision (and also facilitate the recruiting team’s work)

How we built our tech radar

The very first step has been to list our technologies and to do so, we’ve simply created a spreadsheet (similar to the one proposed from Thoughtworks) and assigned a DRI for each area/department with the responsibility to coordinate with the teams and fill the draft document.

This task took a while and sparked the first discussions on what was worth to be listed and what not, since it’s not always easy to distinguish between libraries, frameworks and tools.

Once all the teams filled up the document we went through a review with a small “committee” of experienced managers and leads and we went down from over 180 lines in the spreadsheet to 120 (which is still a considerable amount and it gives you an idea of how easily the number of “stuff” used in tech can grow).

Then we had to decide in which quadrants we wanted to categorise our technologies. In the very first draft we left the “quadrant” field open to suggestions, and we decided to go for the most “populars”:

• Languages and frameworks: Self Explicative
• Data: All the technologies related to data (e.g. databases, DWH tech, data streaming tech etc.)
• Infrastructure: All the technologies that have something to do with our infrastructure, from AWS services to Docker.
• Tools: All the SaaS, open source and internal tools used in the company.

We also needed to decide the meaning of each ring. Even if they are in some way self explicative, we decided to have a more “westwing centric” definition

• Hold: Don’t use or deprecated
• Assess: It’s a new technology or has still a low adoption, please assess through one of our DNA (design and architecture) meetings.
• Trial: Already adopted in the company and very promising but still, before adopting it, consult with your principal engineer and possibly assess it in one of our architectural meetings.
• Adopt: We’ve consistently used the technology in the company and you can adopt it without validation

Once we’ve finalised our document, we’ve started looking for a tool to visualise the radar in an efficient way. Initially we’ve looked in the official Thoughtworks tool, but it required to generate it manually and it can be exported only as an image, so we kept looking and found out that other companies created their own radar. The most popular solution, used by many companies is the zalando tech radar, an open source solution (based on d3.js v4) which draws efficiently a radar in a very clear way, especially if your list is pretty extended.

So we’ve forked the original code, made some changes, added a script to automatically feed the radar from a public spreadsheet and hosted on our public github.

You can find the repository here and our beautiful generated tech radar here.

We will keep it up-to-date in the future, so stay tuned!