Hygiene : The Key to Engineering Excellence
It’s been almost a year since the first stay at home order. As I reflect upon our collective COVID journey, one habit we all have picked up is washing our hands thoroughly and more frequently. This one tenet of personal hygiene is something that became so very important in our fight against COVID.
Over the last few quarters, as we work with more engineering organizations, I can’t help but draw an analogy. Engineering Excellence depends a lot on data driven decisions. In order to make data driven decisions, you need to have good hygienic data that follows good hygienic processes. Bad hygiene can have devastating effects on the efficiency of engineering teams.
One of the first things, we discuss with our customers as we embark with them on an Engineering Excellence journey, is the need for good hygiene.
What do we mean by this? It’s quite simple.
Hygiene — Is everyone on the team following the process guidelines, so that the resulting data is clean, and one can trust the data. Here are some examples of hygiene factors:
- Are developers adding JIRA tickets information in their Pull Requests?
- Are developers closing defects without filing RCA information?
- Are the tickets marked with the right labels and components?
- Are Pagerduty incidents acknowledged without any action?
- Are tickets groomed properly with story points and Definition of Done?
- Are bugs filed without any descriptions?
In an organization, different teams might follow different process guidelines, the hygiene factors could be different, but the need for good hygiene trumps over everything else.
Leveraging the Harness Software Engineering Insights module, engineering management can quickly understand the Hygiene Score for every development team in their organization, across different tools such as Ticket Management tools like JIRA, Incident management tools like — PagerDuty, Source Code Management like GitLab and GitHub, CI tools like Jenkins and Customer Support tools like Salesforce and Zendesk.
Harness offers out of the box hygiene factors and reports and a zero touch deployment model. Teams can very easily add or delete custom hygiene factors based on the process they follow.
Based on working with many different engineering organizations and teams of all shapes and sizes, a hygiene score of 70 and above is generally recommended to run a high performance engineering team.
The higher your hygiene score, the more productive and organized your team feels. It’s no wonder that teams with poor hygiene also have other problems such as retention issues and poor execution.
Do you know your team’s hygiene score? If not, we recommend taking a quick free online assessment to understand how your process and hygiene compare to the rest of your industry and get started on your engineering success journey. Call us for a quick demo on how Harness can help with your engineering success journey.
The higher your hygiene score, the more productive and organized your team feels. It’s no wonder that teams with poor hygiene also have other problems such as retention issues and poor execution.
Do you know your team’s hygiene score? If not, we recommend taking Harness for a Test Drive, to understand how your process and hygiene compare to the rest of your industry and get started on your engineering success journey.