TechRadar: EA Technology Visualisation for Commercial development

Medium-sized enterprises often have complex technology and system landscapes, but may lack the funds or desire to invest money and effort in a high-end toolset to describe and control them.

The usual result is a proliferation of spreadsheets, each telling a different, fragmentary version of the story. Reconciling these multiple versions of the truth can be a complex and time-consuming task. In addition the tabular representation may not be appreciated by some consumers.

The “Technology Radar” representation became popular in around 2016, but on its own this just makes the problem worse: it requires further disjoint sets of information, cannot portray all the complexities, and at the time I investigated all the available low-cost tools were of shocking poor quality and reliability.

TechRadar directly addresses all these problems. The Enterprise Architects maintain a single, simple, version-controlled spreadsheet (or simple database) with a very “flat” presentation of the data. TechRadar can then generate from any given spreadsheet a multi-page PDF with visualisations of the data, in both “Radar” and tabular formats.

TechRadar is a simple .NET application, using only native features and the open-source PDFSharp library. It requires no special installation and can run on any Windows machine with the appropriate minimum .NET version.

TechRadar will shortly be available for download on a shareware basis.