Each employee can give his/her own opinion about technology on this radar. Additionally, people can add their own technologies.
The software has some places where uncareful usage by employees might screw things up:
- The radar does not allow removing technologies (even in case of typos) or moving technologies from/to different categories. This is easy to do by manually editing the database, hwoever.
- No history is kept for the wiki-like "description" field of each technology that anyone can edit. This means that hypothetically, someone could erase everything that someone else added.
Two features were added to mitigate the risk caused by these shortcomings.
Access https://[server]/admin/adminer.php for a web interface to editing the database. This page is password protected.
Once logged in, choose "Sqlite3", and enter "tech_radar.sqlite" for the current, active, production database.
The server automatically creates a full-db backup every 15 minutes. These
are placed in the db\backup\ folder, with names like YYYYMMDD_HH_#.sqlite
where # is an increasing number, starting with 0. So, the first backup made
on October 17th, 2013, after 15:00 will be called 20131017_15_0.sqlite.
From Adminer, open backup\20131017_15_0.sqlite to edit this file.
This backup mechamism allows for a rudimentary "history" feature of all fields. Even assuming a large database of, say, 1 MB, creating a backup every 15 minutes only uses a modest amount of disk space.