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Notes about techniques from Thoughtworks Tech Radar 26

· 3 min read
D Balaji
D Balaji
Lead Design Technologist

techniques

Thoughtworks tech radar is a reputed tech journal available free of cost for subscribers. The content is related to 4 broad categories related to software development. The candidates/techniques are further categorized for easy judgment and use. Here are my notes from episode #26 of tech radar.

Techniques​

I am mostly listing to adopt or hold tools that make sense for mid-size web teams.

1. Four key metrics for high-performance software delivery​

  • Change lead time, this is the time taken for a team to deliver the change to production
  • Deployment frequency, how frequently the changes are deployed
  • Mean time to release (MTTR), how long does the team take to restore an outage
  • Change fail percentage, does deploying changes introduce regression issues & what percentage of deployments create a failure or degrade in performance.

The above metrics give a qualitative view of our deliveries.

Production readiness review (PRR)​

PRR is a checklist to empower developers to software release and launch.

  • Product release - shipping the software for consumers for use
    • Ownership identification
    • Training / Documentation
    • Process start time
    • Process stop time
  • Product launch - letting the world know
  • Product testing results
    • showstoppers - entire product is affected
    • high priority - workflow blocked but no workaround
    • mid-priority - workflow blocked but has a workaround
    • low priority - minor irritations / cosmetic problems
  • Code freeze
  • Documentation
  • Going live with your product
    • product launch plan
    • product launch goals
  • Disaster recovery

    • CI - build, tests

    • CD - deploy to production

Documentation quadrants​

Technical documentation can be daunting for writers and consumers. But how about giving it an architecture?

https://documentation.divio.com/

The simplest architecture looks like this

Axis 1: nature of information, practical or theoretical

Axis 2: where the artifact is used, studied, and working

This is an important topic given that the world is witnessing a steady inflow of software tools and software libs. How about each of them having a good documentation architecture? It would be a great win for Developer Experience (DX).

CUPID, similar to SOLID​

Composable, Unix-like (Does one thing very well), Predictable, Idiomatic, and Domain-based solution.

Techniques about frontend that were discussed​

  • SPA by default
  • Hotwire - send HTML instead of JSON over the wire
  • Server-driven UI for mobile
  • Micro frontends