Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Approaches to Technology Evaluation

I'm going to keep a running tab for Approaches to Technology Evaluation in small companies with small budgets, and tight schedules. This list should be full of ideas to do it and keep it affordable. This list doesn't really even have to be about software, it should apply anywhere.

  • Brown Bag Lunches
Pick a day each week, any day, and have everyone each lunch together for an hour while someone does a presentation on a new technology. Rotate the presenter, so even on a team as small as five everyone has five weeks to prepare. This is plenty of time. I think this can be a very effective, inspiring method for evaluation, and it has side effects of getting everyone involved, everyone gets to learn, and you build better moral.

  • Dedicate at least some actual work time to it.
Dedicate someone to it one day a week. Obviously this is a slightly more expensive approach. The company is actually paying for it. But, it guarantees that you get some quality time into it. The previous approach could easily break down it people don't want to spend much time at home. You have to judge your group.

  • Partition Work
If you partition your work properly, into independent modules, then you should be able to choose any module and build it using entirely new technologies, or just one new technology, keeping others around. This shouldn't cause dependency issues because the modules are separated.

This will have costs. At the least you need to do a minimal amount of evaluation, and spend some time up front learning new technologies chosen via evaluation. You may also find that the new technology is no good after you build, and have to rebuild using your older technology. If you're working with more than one new technology, you may run into a situation where you're unclear which technology is bad, and might mistakenly decide all of them are bad.

  • Force out old technologies
Choose a number like 5. Any technologies older than five years old are considered legacy tehcnologies, and under no circumstances should you continue any work with that technology. This approach is far more expensive then the others listed. But one that promises to ward off stagnation.

  • Force in new technologies
Slightly similar to the last approach is forcing in new technologies. This doesn't mean forcing out old ones however. It means you maintain the legacy technology, and proceed with development on the new technology. This can lead to maintenance issues, but I tend to think that developing further with the old technology leads to more issues.

Both of the last two approaches aren't really evaluation approaches, they need to be used in conjunction with an evaluation approach. But, having either policy will certainly stimulate the evaluation.


More Ideas To Come!

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