SWE team process

Non exhaustive list of process that a Software Engineering team can implement. Note that process should also be removed sometimes, not only be added.

Planning

• Brainstorming sessions
• Involving engineering in planning with other disciplines, such as design or business stakeholders
• Project kickoffs
• Design documents/requests for comments (RFCs)
• Architecture decision records (ADRs)

Building

• Prototyping
• Code reviews
• Automated testing
• Continuous integration
• Documenting decisions

Releasing

• Continuous deployment
• Release plans
• Feature flags and experimentation
• Signing off with stakeholders, such as product, compliance, security
• Gathering feedback from customers
• Canaries and automated rollbacks

Maintaining

• Oncall process
• Support engineering
• Incident reviews
• Improving infrastructure and platforms
• Periods of non-product development, such as fixing tech debt, improving infrastructure

Engineering productivity

• Team retrospectives
• Handling tech debt
• Investing in efficient tooling like CI/CD, helpful scripts, etc.
• Reducing frequency of meetings
• No-meeting days

Team health

• Team events and offsites
• Spontaneous team events like getting ice cream. For remote teams, organizing events where everyone gets together, or virtual, fun events
• Celebrating team and individual achievements