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Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.

When you survey developers on how to improve engineering practices and their daily job experience, their answers invariably include getting rid of little annoying things - what's called toil. Toil is manual and repetitive tasks that waste your time. Toil is arguably worse than crisis, because a crisis is temporary and firefighting can feel rewarding when it's over. Toil is more like a death march - an insidious force that eventually leads to burnout.

Sleuth's new Goals dashboard helps teams set, track, and achieve their goals. Here's how it works.

We talk with numerous teams that want to improve their engineering performance. Here, we explain how to accelerate your progress using DORA metrics — a set of key performance indicators that can help you measure and optimize your team's software development process. You'll learn practical tips on how to leverage these metrics to achieve faster and more efficient team improvement. But first, you'll need your team to see the value in DORA metrics.