As an engineering leader, I’m often faced with the same question: how can we keep delivery times up while protecting the health of our engineering org?
In order to build reliable systems while continually delivering value, we need to balance engineering health (our team’s ability to function successfully and maintain quality) with delivery speed. But this balance can be difficult to achieve, and there are a few common patterns that teams can fall into.
The first is firefighting (where teams are inundated with issues as a result of instability). Delivering value to customers is fraught with risks, and teams often pause projects to fix issues.