OVO.com Technology Radar

ovo-com-tech-radar.ovotech.org.uk

The OVO.com Technology Radar is a living document that captures and provides a high-level overview of our technology landscape.

The radar consists of four quadrants:

• Techniques
  Includes various aspects of software development process and ways of working.
• Languages & Frameworks
  Our main programming languages and key frameworks used for development.
• Platforms
  Platforms that we use to build our software on top, e.g. databases, cloud services etc.
• Tools
  Various software development tools that make our lives easier.

Each quadrant is divided into four rings:

• Adopt
  Technologies we have high confidence in to serve our purpose, also in large scale. Technologies with a usage culture in our OVO production environment, low risk and recommended to be widely used.
• Assess
  Technologies that are promising and have clear potential value-add for us; technologies worth investing research and proof of concept efforts in to see if they may add value. These technologies have higher risks; they are often brand new and highly unproven in our organisation. You will find some engineers that have knowledge in the technology and promote it, you may even find teams that have started a proof of concept effort.
• Trial
  Technologies that we have seen work with success in project work to solve a real problem; first serious usage experience that confirm benefits and can uncover limitations. These technologies are slightly more risky; some engineers in our organisation have used them before and will share knowledge and experiences.
• Hold
  Technologies not recommended to be used for new projects. Technologies that we think are not (yet) worth to (further) invest in. The technologies should not be used for new projects, but usually can be continued for existing projects.

Why you should use the Radar

A consistent technology stack is often a big driver of delivery efficiency, cost effectiveness and knowledge sharing across teams and the Technology Radar is an important tool that helps us in discussions about the technologies that we want to standardise on and invest in as an organisation.

FAQs

Why is there only the Adopt ring on the Radar?

We've initially created the Radar only with technologies in the Adopt ring to emphasize the focus on technologies which are already widely adopted and used in production at OVO.com, but we will expand it to other rings in the future.

What to do if a technology I want to trial is not listed here?

To assess or trial a new technology that's not listed on the Radar, please use our #ovo-com-tech Slack channel to start a discussion and share your use case with others.

What to do if the technology I want to use is listed in the Adopt ring?

You should feel free to adopt the technology on your project, but we encourage everyone to reach out to our engineering community on Slack in #ovo-com-tech channel to validate their design, find our more about how the technology is currently used and get some general advice from others.

Contributing

The OVO.com Technology Radar is owned by the OVO.com engineering community. As such, anyone can:

• fork & raise pull requests for additions, clarifications, grammar fixes, formatting changes and any other suggestions
• raise GitHub issues with any questions or improvements that might not be appropriate for a pull request
• review and comment on pull requests

For any external contributions, please raise an issue or get in touch with us via our ovotech/general channel on Gitter.