Technology addiction is dangerous.
I know what I’m talking about. I was an addict focusing on technology for technology, influenced by the engineering ecosystem I was in.
I then moved on, starting to ask longer questions.
The shift went from “Does it work?” to “Does it work for our business, today and tomorrow?” and “What’s the minimal solution?”.
We explored the key reasons to contain the technology entropy in “More Technology, More Problems”; this article focuses on the how.
This article shares how to build a technology radar for Quality at Speed streamlining your business, technology and organization.
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Start by acting the Quality Engineering way
The quickest solution would be to start cataloging all technologies in use. But minimal preparation makes the difference.
The following guidelines will get you off a right start:
- Use automation wherever possible to retrieve technologies in use;
- Be collaborative to build adhesion and obtain what’s out of scanners;
- Identify meta-data such as domain, functions and scope of deployment.
You can usually retrieve useful information in code repositories (e.g. Git) and deployment platforms (e.g. Gitlab, GitHub, Azure DevOps, etc).
Scanner solutions exist, but avoid adding another technology if you don’t have one.
Collaboration can be done sharing your initiative on the priorities planning, organizing a kick-off and following-up sync with stakeholders.
You can then move on building your technology radar.
Build your Quality Engineering technology portfolio
We can think of a technology portfolio as a mere list of technologies in use — but specific information provides you with a larger perspective.
Context is important for global and local decisions; a user interface technology is not the same concern for millions of end-users…
