How to use the CHT Technology Radar for Implementers
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 Implementers provides an easy-to-grasp visual representation of features, data use tools, deployment management built around 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: Should we use couch2pg or CHT Sync for our project?
Audience
Implementers, App 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 community faces 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 implementing CHT projects. Developers outside of CHT Community should hopefully find the information in this technology overview inspirational.
The items are grouped or categorized in 4 quadrants.
The quadrants are:
- App Building: These components help build CHT apps, like CHT Conf, and form preview/builder tools like XLSForm.
- CHT App Features: Aspects of CHT Core Framework that can be used in CHT Apps. These could include new CHT form widgets, updated UI elements like the floating action button, and user management features.
- Data Use: This includes tools and components used to manage data that comes in or out of the CHT. It also includes integrations, interoperability standards and methods, ETL, Pipeline, and querying techniques. Additionally, this quadrant contains visualization tools for dashboards.
- Deployment Management: Deploying and maintaining CHT instances takes considerable coordination, especially for large-scale deployments. This quadrant also includes key aspects for hosting, including tools and methods for alerts and monitoring.
Each of the items is classified in one of these rings:
- Adopt: The Adopt ring represents technologies and features 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.
- 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 Implementers
Contributions and source code of the CHT Technology Radar for Implementers are on GitHub. Inspired by AOE Tech Radar.