Let's pretend you are building a typical CRUD web application with medium level of expected traffic, some kind of SaaS. You could build it with MySQL, Ubuntu,

Let's pretend you are building a typical CRUD web application with medium level of expected traffic, some kind of SaaS. You could build it with MySQL, Ubuntu, using Gitlab for source control and pick a web framework - Laravel, Rails, Django, etc. And that could be successful. Or you could pick Postgres, Redhat and Github with whatever web framework and that could be successful. Pure technical decisions are usually better off going with what people are most familiar/knowledgeable with assuming those are mainstream supported technologies. An important aspect is the cost or ease of switching to something else later on - the impact of the decision itself. Switching out your hosted git provider is probably easy, maybe a day of downtime. Switching out databases once you have users on the system would be a major project, maybe 3-6 months. Changing out web frameworks in the example SaaS could be an entire re-write. If you need to present your findings to some management layer to get them onboard then you may want to get a sense of what they're thinking (i.e. does someone really like XYZ?) so you can focus efforts appropriately. Gathering info on non-functional aspects (cost, support, license model, etc.) will go a long way towards them evaluating the decision if they are non technical.