How to use the CHT Technology Radar for Contributors
Introduction
It is essential for a development toolkit such as the Community Health Toolkit to constantly improve and keep track with the latest useful innovations. It is important to openly look for innovations and new technologies and to question established technologies and methods every now and then.
What is the Technology Radar?
To enhance visibility and clarity on the technology choices, the technological strategy, and the available CHT features and tools, we leverage a framework called Technology Radar.
The CHT Technology Radar for Contributors provides an easy-to-grasp visual representation of tools, languages, frameworks, platforms, and techniques we use to build the CHT. Additionally, the Technology Radar provides a degree of adoption and guidelines on using (or not using) a particular technology. The community can leverage it to answer questions like: What’s the difference between technologies such as Klipfolio, Superset, and Grafana?
Audience
Contributors, Developers
How it is created
The items in the technology radar are raised by the different contributors and therefore a lot of the items are related to the work and challenges the contributors face in the different initiatives.
How should it be used
The radar acts as an overview of technologies that everyone in the CHT Community should currently know about. Its goal is to act as a guide in the community when contributing to the CHT. Developers outside of CHT Community should hopefully find the information in this technology overview inspirational.
The items are grouped or categorized in 4 quadrants - (sometimes, when it's not 100% clear where a item belongs, the best fit was chosen).
The quadrants are:
- Languages & Frameworks: Include development languages and more low-level development frameworks, which help implement custom software of all kinds.
- Tools: These can be components, like databases, software development tools, such as version control systems.
- Techniques: Include elements of a software development process, such as continuous integration, and ways of creating software, such as progressive web applications.
- Platforms: There are things that we build software on top of, such as mobile technologies like Android or generic kinds of platforms like Amazon Web Services.
Each of the items is classified in one of these rings:
- Adopt: The Adopt ring represents tools that you should seriously consider using. We don’t say you should use these for every project; one should only use a tool in an appropriate context. However, an item in the Adopt ring represents something where there’s no doubt it’s proven and mature for use with the CHT.
- Trial: The Trial ring is for tools ready for use but only partially proven as those in the Adopt ring. You should use these on a trial basis to decide whether they should be part of your toolkit. Others may already be using these items in production, likely as early adopters of the tools.
- Assess: The Assess ring contains items to look at closely, but not necessarily trial yet - unless you think they would be a particularly good fit for you. Typically, items in the Assess ring are interesting and worth keeping an eye on.
- Stop: The Stop (or Not Recommended) ring is for things we think implementers should avoid using or look for ways to move off of. These include items for which a better alternative is available, or where the item is found to not work correctly with the CHT.
Contributing to the CHT Technology Radar for Contributors
Contributions and source code of the CHT Technology Radar for Contributors are on GitHub. Inspired by AOE Tech Radar.