My Quarterly System Health Check-In: Beyond the Dashboard
4 days ago
- #engineering-leadership
- #strategic-reflection
- #quality-assessment
- Periodically reflect on strategic goals with a structured operational exercise lasting 2-4 hours, monthly or quarterly.
- Quality is defined by dimensions like reliability, performance, cost, delivery, security, simplicity, and social structures.
- Questions are designed to be informal, intuitive, instinctive, and emotional to provoke honest discussions.
- Focus on systems (software services or groups) and involve people who work on them daily.
- Simplicity is key: evaluate onboarding, domain modeling, design, and ease of debugging.
- Delivery: assess speed, deploy frequency, confidence in tests, and local setup efficiency.
- Reliability: examine incident management, alert noise, and system dependencies.
- Performance: ensure expectations are clear, bottlenecks identified, and optimizations flexible.
- Organization: align team responsibilities with system architecture and process design.
- Cost and security are important but not covered in detail; collaboration is invited.