The shape of a shifting landscape – Introducing the Waracle100

In Q1 2026, we decided to make it a priority to understand the shifting sands of the technology industry through the lens of our practitioners’ day-to-day work. 

The concept was simple: gather the collective intelligence of our teams, ask them what is working, what is emerging, and what should be quietly retired, then publish our findings openly. No marketing spin. No vendor influence. Just honest, hard-won perspectives from people who build things for a living.

We treated it like a project. First, we went divergent, asking each of our practices about the tools, frameworks and ways of thinking they’re excited to use, often using, and those they wish they weren’t using any more. We then had the fun job of trying to make over 1100 data points from those workshops  1) consumable, 2) relevant and 3) useful to our clients, prospects and partners.

Introducing the Waracle100.

Here is why we did it, and why now.

Our clients operate in some of the most demanding sectors in the world. Healthcare. Financial services, Public Sector and Energy. Regulated environments where a poor technology decision does not just slow a sprint down, it can derail a product, create a compliance problem, hit the P+L hard, and ultimately let down the people who depend on that product most. 

When clients ask us “what actually works?”, they deserve a better answer than a best guess or a vendor recommendation. They deserve the honest, collective view of the people doing the work.

That is exactly what the Waracle100 is.

A view into the landscape of what is emerging, best practice, or on its way out. And as you’ll have read in our AI-enabled SDLC whitepaper, things are changing… fast.

How we created the 100.

To build it, we went to our people. Over 320 specialists across engineering, design, data, product management, QA and delivery. We ran structured workshops across our communities of practice, gathering real perspectives on what is genuinely delivering results today. 

From those conversations, we sorted everything into three categories. 

• Emerging: Technologies, tools and methodologies that are showing genuine promise and warrant serious attention.
• Established: The proven standards our teams rely on day in, day out—the things we would confidently recommend to any client.
• Retiring: The approaches that have been superseded, that are losing their effectiveness, or that we think the industry has simply held onto for too long out of habit.

We then ranked the most frequently mentioned across each category to land on the final 100.

What makes the output genuinely useful is how we display it. Rather than a long list, we plot perspectives across a 3×3 grid. The shape that emerges is a snapshot of the current landscape at a glance. Where is innovation strongest right now? Where are tools and methods beginning to lose their value? The grid makes that visible quickly, without needing to read a lengthy report to get the picture.

Not one and done.

The Waracle100 is not a one-off exercise. Our industry moves quickly, and the advice we give our clients has to move with it. We will keep this updated as our thinking evolves, as new tools prove themselves in practice, and as older approaches fade. It is a living document, not a trophy on a shelf.

Most importantly, it is grounded in lived experience. Every entry on the Waracle100 reflects the perspective of engineers, designers, data specialists, product managers, QAs and delivery managers who have done this work in the real world, in regulated sectors, with actual users depending on the outcome.

We think that matters. There is a lot of noise in the technology industry about what you should be doing, what you should be adopting, what the future looks like. Most of it is generated by people who are trying to sell you something. The Waracle100 is our way of cutting through that, sharing what we genuinely know, and making sure the advice we give clients is rooted in something more reliable than a conference talk or a trending LinkedIn post.

The Waracle100 is live now at https://100.waracle.com. 

Take a look, and if you want to talk through what it means for your organisation and the decisions you are facing, we would love to hear from you at marketing@waracle.com.