That’s no longer a secret that creating and maintaining what Thoughtworks described as a Tech Radar allows for a better vision on what to use and what not in software engineering organizations. It also enables team discussions with regards to the “why” and helps fostering a culture of transparency and trust. You can read more about it here.
However, up until now, the process to create these Tech Radars remained very organization specific, and no real tool existed. This was about a mix of Google docs for the brainstorming and syncing steps, and open source libraries for the visualization part: not ideal.
Meet Watnwy [Pronounce What And Why]
Watnwy.com is a platform to document the What, the Why and the Why now, in the form of Tech Radars.
The concept is simple: you have “objects” that can be anything of interest: languages, frameworks, libraries, team topologies, onboarding process, … You want to attach a status to these objects: adopt, trial, assess, hold (More on these statuses here). These statuses are motivated by rationales which the team agrees on. The objects and their statuses are put on a radar for sharing purposes and easy visualization.
As collaboration is key in creating a good and understandable radar, the platform provides features such as:
- built-in peer reviewing system;
- comments;
- document history;
- fine-grained access control.
All the objects are then put on a global radar in a flat way. You can then use some filter expressions to display exactly what you want and take a snapshot for easy sharing.
You can see a snapshot of the Watnwy radar here.
The Watnwy Github application
Documenting your Tech landscape is one thing, and it definitely already creates value to your organization, but another thing is to make sure your documentation is up to date, and that it’s consistent with your codebase. This is where the Watnwy Github app comes into play.
Watnwy will run analysers on your codebase on every commit to detect what you use to both feed your radar, and make sure you don’t start to use things that you shouldn’t. The analysers are open source and available on Github here.
Interested in knowing more about Watnwy?
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