The Art of CTO Tech Stack Risk Radar scores each technology in your stack across eight weighted factors — maturity, community support, security posture, talent availability, maintenance burden, strategic fit, vendor lock-in and migration complexity — rolled up into technical, organizational and strategic risk pillars.
Which of our technologies is a risk?
A risk score per technology across eight factors, ready for your tech radar.
About 15 min · Assessment · Free
About this toolWhy it matters, common mistakes, FAQ
Which Of Your Technologies Is Quietly Becoming A Problem?
Technology risk rarely announces itself. A maintainer steps back, a licence changes, a vendor is acquired, a runtime goes end-of-life — and the cost lands one or two years later as an unplanned migration during a quarter you needed for something else.
Attention goes to what is breaking now. The dependencies worth watching are the stable ones nobody thinks about, because those are where a single upstream decision turns into a year of work.
Questions CTOs ask
- How do you assess technology adoption risk?
- This tool scores each technology across eight factors and groups them into three pillars. The technical pillar covers maturity (release history and API stability), community support (contributor activity, issue resolution, release cadence) and security posture (CVE history and response times). The organizational pillar covers talent availability (how easily you can hire or train for it) and maintenance burden (what it costs you to keep running). The strategic pillar covers strategic fit — the highest-weighted factor of the eight — plus vendor lock-in and migration complexity, which together tell you what leaving would cost. Scoring the cost of leaving alongside the risk of staying is what stops the assessment becoming a popularity contest.
- What are the warning signs of a risky technology choice?
- Key warning signs include declining GitHub stars and contributor activity, infrequent releases or long-unresolved issues, a single corporate sponsor with unclear commitment, difficulty hiring developers with experience in the technology, frequent breaking changes between versions, and a small ecosystem of libraries and integrations. Technologies showing three or more of these signals warrant serious reconsideration or an explicit risk mitigation plan.
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