Engineering onboarding comprises more than just allocation of credentials and orientation to top tools. Depending on staffing, capacity for resource and permission allocation, and maturity of self-serve tooling, it can take weeks or even months for engineers to contribute their first meaningful PR—a common measure of "onboarding completeness." So how should engineering leaders think about optimizing their processes to improve developer effectiveness, velocity, and confidence?

We know speed to market matters—now more than ever. Bill Gates said in the nineties that “if you don’t meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, someone else will.” But software quality also matters, affecting everything from customer loyalty to developer experience. Poor quality causes immediate issues like bugs and crashes, as well as building technical debt and making updates needlessly hard.

Software quality isn't just about defect density; it embodies the reliability, performance, and security that underpin digital trust and user satisfaction. But measuring software quality can be as challenging as defining it. In this post, we'll demystify the complexities around assessing software quality and provide actionable insights for you and your software development team.

Developers are working to faster development cycles, having their productivity measured in embarrassing ways and facing burnout due to poor productivity metrics. Detecting and preventing bugs in this environment is challenging for developers, but code quality is too important to ignore or leave to chance. Improving code quality requires smart metrics, not just more measurement. The quality of your code is foundational to your software, and ultimately your products and company.

On December 31, 2008, all the Microsoft Zunes around the world stopped working. The development team hadn’t properly accounted for the Leap Year, and when the year changed over, everything broke. On February 29, 2024, card payments in a Swedish grocery chain went down, payment terminals in New Zealand gas stations crashed, and an EA Sports racing game was rendered unplayable for the day.

After decades as a software engineer, I’ve seen firsthand how complexity can grow exponentially with scale. Thankfully, over that time, quite a few tools have come along to help manage some of that complexity. One great example is the Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), which were built to connect an engineering organization’s architecture, processes, documentation, and definitions and alignment to standards of health.

Faster software development cycles means greater reward, and greater risk. Organizations that lose sight of continuous alignment to standards risk delayed launches, higher risk of churn, and higher costs—not to mention unproductive and unhappy developers. Building a strong production readiness review process can help, but existing tools and frameworks haven’t made it easy to keep up to date with the increased velocity at which software is expected to ship.

When speed to market can make or break a business, the move from monoliths to microservices has become an obvious choice for many engineering teams. This transformation promises agility, scalability, and the ability to more closely align with business functions. It is why we see organizations moving from the rigidity and restrictions of monoliths to the flexibility and control associated with microservices architectures.

Already a quarter of the way into 2024, we’re seeing a lot of shake-up in on-call best practices. We’re excited to see AI in the mix, but we’re also seeing a renewed focus on existing and neglected best practices. Some current topics in on-call best practices include: In this article, we’ll review some best practices and explore the 2024 trends.

It's been a decade since Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world, and it is still hungry. Customers expect software solutions for every need, driving digital transformation in every analogue industry. Software quality is now fundamental to company reputation, directly affecting customer satisfaction, brand and overall business success.