#80 Software engineering principles
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Software engineering principles
Through our combined experience of building and releasing software we have discovered and come to value the following principles. These principles are not hard and fast rules but rather some things that we apply and use to guide us on a daily basis. These principles could also be used in a "discovery phase" when selecting a new product to purchase.
Developing a values interview question
When it came time to hire, we knew we needed to select people who’d align with this value. It was central enough to our way of working that someone who had a different way of working wouldn’t have worked out. We wouldn’t have been happy with someone who needed to find optimal solutions; they would have been miserable being asked to implement something that was merely okay. It’s not that this value is “right” and that people who felt differently were “wrong” in some way. Other organizations – other successful organizations – work differently. But it was “right for us” at the time, and we needed to hire people who wanted to work this way.
Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams
An introduction to psychological safety and ways to evaluate the level of safety in your organization.
Trunk and branches model for scaling infrastructure organizations
Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team.
In its early days, a startup searches for a good product-market fit. When it finds one it looks to grow rapidly, a phase known as a scaleup. At this time it's growing rapidly along many dimensions: revenues, customer, headcount. At Thoughtworks, we've worked with many such scaleups, and our work has focused on how to help them overcome various bottlenecks that impede this growth.
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