Clients expect prompt implementation of changes to their software, and this requirement motivates site reliability engineers to incorporate reliability into applications. The healthy practice of observability and monitoring can improve the reliability and security of software systems. Monitoring is the recording and interpreting data from software systems to keep track of their performance.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of principles that incorporates aspects of software engineering into IT operations. It takes tasks that would typically have been done manually by operations teams and gives them to engineers to solve using software and automation. This helps to create a bridge between development and operations teams. The concept of SRE was created by Google back in 2003. Since then, it has been adopted by thousands of organizations all over the world.

Technical debt is the implied cost of the additional work that is required when a team chooses a quick, easy solution that is limited, instead of a more well-thought-out, higher-quality solution that would take longer. Essentially, it’s what happens when teams prioritize speed over quality. Examples of technical debt include untested code, unreadable code, dead code, duplicated code, or outdated documentation.

Technical debt is one of the trade-offs today’s software teams make to speed up development, which helps go-to-market time in return. That is mission-critical for most start-ups. Instead of dwelling on implementation details, or trying to cover edge cases that may affect a small fraction of the end-users in an early development stage, agile teams prioritize early and continuous delivery.

Objectives help monitor different aspects of your services and systems such as latencies, error rates, PRs that are open, the age of a bug, and more. These are examples of things that drift away from what we think is good; which is essentially what an objective is. Objectives help us to define what ‘good’ looks like.

‘OKR’, which stands for ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ is a goal management framework designed to define goals and track outcomes. It differs from typical goal-setting techniques because the aim is to set very ambitious goals that encourage teams to flex their creativity. OKRs are used by Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other successful companies to create measurable goals, and to make sure team members are aligned and engaged.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) does the work that would typically be done by operations but instead uses engineers with software experience to solve problems. The concept of SRE was created by Google in 2003 after a team of software engineers was asked to make Google’s sites more scalable, reliant, and efficient. They described SRE as ‘when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem’.

Reliability testing is a software testing technique designed to make sure that a piece of software meets customer requirements, and to identify any faults within the product before it is delivered to the customer. It is the key to improving the design, functionality, and ultimately the quality of software. It should be performed at each level of software creation, and it encompasses everything from unit testing, to full system testing.