Introduction
This article is a continuation of my series on developing and improving engineering capability within an organisation. In the first part of the series I discussed the key traits of great engineering teams and the key factors that should be considered before setting up high-performing, autonomous engineering teams.
In this article, we will discuss the operating frameworks that great engineering teams follow to continuously excel in their craft. Specifically, we will focus on the art of “Engineering Excellence”.
Please do share your thoughts here or on LinkedIn as they are invaluable for me to understand what truly brings value addition for yourself and thus helps me focus my efforts in those areas.
Chronological Reading In this Series
- Setting up high-performing, autonomous Engineering Teams and their key traits — https://nik-gupta.medium.com/developing-and-improving-engineering-capability-1dbac4caa629
- The Art of Engineering Excellence and a framework to measure your team’s maturity — https://nik-gupta.medium.com/engineering-excellence-793531c99df0
- The Art of Operational Excellence and a framework to measure your team’s maturity — https://nik-gupta.medium.com/operational-excellence-51a16f183474
What is Engineering Excellence
Engineering Excellence is a set of practices which defines, evaluates and improves upon the core engineering practices of a team.
There are many definitions and interpretations of the phrase “Engineering Excellence”. For me, Engineering Excellence is a set of best practices that are established within an organisation or a team which enable the team to engineer secure, future-proof, optimised systems with minimum operational burden, at scale, while helping them improve their efficiency and productivity in a data-driven framework.
These best practices can be aligned with the following themes
- Design and Code Review
- Unit Testing
- Continuous Integration and Deployments
- Code Quality
- Source Code Management and Reusability
Within each of these, the teams can define their own frameworks, ways of working and evaluating models for them to measure their maturity with respect to engineering excellence.
Questions that Simulate Great Debates
Consider answering some of these questions to probe deep into your current practices and what would truly bring most benefit to your organisations/teams.
- Does the team do sufficient upfront design to ensure changes in production are minimal?
- Does the team adopt the best practices such as architectural forums where engineers present their design for accuracy and compliance, and get feedback from senior/ distinguished engineers?
- Does the team know how to measure their productivity using established industry metrics such as DORA and do they have the right tooling to do so?
- Does the team have a peer and code review process that is followed religiously?
- How manual are their testing and deployment processes, can they deploy at scale and with high velocity (AirBnB can famously deploy the whole site in under 10 minutes)?
- What is their code quality today, and do they have sufficient tools to measure code quality and demonstrate improvement?
- Do they have enough autonomy and time to look beyond their day-to-day responsibilities and find opportunities to innovate in their technology areas?
- Is the team set up accordingly to deliver on their charter (more on this in a follow-up post later)?
- How do they take time to improve and innovate on their systems and their skill sets?
- How do they evaluate emerging technologies and plan a roadmap to adopt the ones that bring value to their systems?
- How do they disseminate their knowledge and learnings across the team?
A framework for Engineering Excellence
For convenience, I am providing a basic framework that attempts to categorise teams into 5 possible maturity levels (5 being the most mature) depending on the practices they follow within each of these broad disciplines.
This framework can act as a catalyst for teams to think about their own established, formal or non-formal practices that they follow in these disciplines.
Use this framework as the starting point and adjust/ delete/ add whatever works best for your unique DNA to help craft your version of Engineering Excellence and the criteria to evaluate the maturity of your teams.
Given Medium’s inability to process tables effectively, I am pasting screenshots of the frameworks below. You can find an editable version on Google Docs here
Summary
Engineering Excellence is a set of processes, tools and thought models that continuously drive the team towards better engineering processes. These processes are usually summed up in the 6 themes presented in the blog post. Each team and organisation has their unique DNA. Thus it is important to probe your own setup deeply and adopt, add or discard what works best for you.
