What?

Engineering readiness is a methodical process for debugging the overall engineering state of your team. It covers your processes, technical hygiene, and operational maturity.

By going through this process you can identfy where gaps may be, areas where there needs to be additional investments or areas where you're showing good practices to help guide execution.

It's a good exercise to get teams to do this across the business at the appropriate flight level, either at the domain or product level.

It's important to note this list is not meant to be prescriptive. It's merely a guide to check against common practices in teams to ensure to ensure there’s shared clarity on what “good” looks like.

Why?

Some of this may seem like common sense — but when it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. Documenting these foundations ensures a shared understanding beyond just sprint delivery.

It also ensures a transparent and systematic approach to engineering excellence where you can "show the working" so to speak of all the work that goes into delivering value to the business in addition to the impact from feature work

How?

Here is a sensible default of engineering readiness.

The main question we should be answering here is "as a team, how ready are we to deliver consistently and reliably for the business"

Run this as a quarterly health-check with your team. Assign statuses, discuss deltas, and track improvements over time. Pair it with retros or planning offsites for deeper insight.

You may find some of these completely irrelevant to your team, and that's perfectly fine

Reliability & Incident Management

Code Quality & Security

Planning & Execution

Team Process & Culture

Communication