What are Technology Radars, and how do they keep us at the cutting-edge of technologies, techniques, and industry improvements?
Medic’s Engineering Manager Andra Blaj explains.
“Why?”
That was the question that followed me in my first few weeks at Medic, as I became familiar with the technologies we were using and building.
Why use CouchDB and not another non-relational database?
Why do we use Klipfolio, Superset, and Grafana for analytics?
Why not use Metabase, which in my opinion would have been a better tool?
Of course, there turned out to be a very good reason for every choice. But there was no or little written record of those decisions. So then my question became…
“How?”
How could we easily grasp a dense technology landscape and understand certain choices?
How could we document technology decisions in a centralized and open place?
How about when the team is a community of contributors, implementers, and digital enthusiasts?
These are hard questions, but luckily there is a fantastic framework called a Technology Radar to address these exact challenges.
What is a Technology Radar?
Technology Radar provides an easy-to-grasp visual representation of tools, languages, frameworks, platforms, and techniques, as well as features and functionalities available to build the Community Health Toolkit (CHT). It also provides guidance on the degree of adoption of a particular technology with the CHT.
As the technical steward of the CHT, Medic maintains it at the forefront of the newest technologies, techniques, and industry innovations. By leveraging a Technology Radar, the CHT enhances the transparency, visibility, and clarity of a rich technological landscape to better serve the ecosystem.
Building Technology Radars
Human-centered design (HCD) is a critical part of developing any tool at Medic, and building out Technology Radars was no exception.
In this case, we determined the need for two radars, each designed specifically for the technologists using it. While both versions leverage existing open-source tools by ThoughtWorks and AOE to implement the visual interface; the difference is in the content and the audience it targets.
For Implementers
The CHT Technology Radar for Implementers provides a view of all CHT-related tools and components to support CHT implementers and application developers in making informed technology decisions when designing, developing, and hosting their CHT applications.
This radar’s content is categorized into four quadrants: App Building, CHT App Features, Data Use, and Deployment Management; as well as three adoption degrees: Adopt, Trial, and Stop.
For Contributors
The CHT Technology Radar for Contributors provides a helpful view for developers to know what languages, tools, platforms, or techniques to use while contributing to CHT tools.
This radar’s content is categorized into four quadrants: Languages & Frameworks, Tools, Techniques, and Platforms; and four adoption degrees: Adopt, Trial, Assess, and Stop.
What are the benefits?
The benefits of Technology Radars are as wide-ranging as the technical landscapes they evaluate. These include:
Continuously improving the technology landscape
Technology changes at a very fast pace. To stay relevant, the Technology Radars will require a review every six months of the CHT technological landscape, finding strengths and vulnerabilities, and questioning established methods.
It brings to light things that need to be upgraded, reviewed or replaced to make the Toolkit better, faster, more scalable, easy to maintain, and, ultimately, provide better support to the community. The Technology Radar also acts as an audit trail of those regular discussions and helps build insights on the different technologies and their usage over time.
Aligning community views
A Technology Radar helps a whole community of contributors, implementers, and open-source or digital health enthusiasts, align on decisions about a new feature, app, or deployment. It breaks down specific technology choices and challenges,- in an easily digestible format for non-technologists, too.
Onboarding new contributors and implementers
Technology Radars provide a fantastic starting point for new CHT developers: they tell them what technical skills they need, what options are available, and whether a specific technology has already been assessed or deprecated.
Staying open
Medic’s commitment to open-source means that all the content of the Technology Radars is public on GitHub and the CHT documentation site. This makes it easy for the community to find and open to comments and suggestions, starting the conversation.
Starting a conversation
Discussion is part of the fun of building digital tools. Reviewing the technology landscape unites the CHT community in conversation to do what they love most: learn, try new techniques, share opinions, and harness technological innovation to improve health outcomes.
Want to join the conversation?
To stay updated on CHT technology improvements or start a discussion about a specific technology: subscribe to the GitHub repositories or share your thoughts on the CHT Forum.