Engineering Practices for Achieving Stability – PwP Episode 26

Challenges

  • Ensuring stability in rapidly evolving software environments.
  • Balancing feature delivery with maintaining a stable codebase.
  • Preventing disruptions caused by incomplete or rushed implementations.

Solutions

  • Implementing engineering practices that focus on stability.
  • Utilizing automated testing and continuous integration to detect issues early.
  • Prioritizing stability over speed in high-risk scenarios.

Benefits

  • More reliable software with fewer disruptions or regressions.
  • Increased team confidence in deploying updates.
  • Greater customer satisfaction through consistent and stable user experiences.

In this episode, Jeffrey discusses the suggested engineering practices for achieving stability. After establishing quality, achieving stability is the next pillar in the Clear Measure Way along the path to increasing speed. Without stability, the software team will always be devoting some portion of its capacity to diagnosing and fixing stability issues with the software in production.

Priorities:

  • Prevent production issues
  • Correct production issues quickly

Stability practices:

  • Automated deployments
  • Formal release candidates
  • Low-maintenance environments
  • Runtime automated health checks
  • Production-like pre-production environments
  • Explicit secrets management
  • Centralized logging
  • Custom application metrics & events
  • Distributed tracing
  • APM tool with an operations dashboard
  • Anomaly alerts
  • Emergency alarms
  • Formal support desk w/ ticket tracking

Sample repository: https://github.com/ClearMeasureLabs/onion-architecture-dotnet-7-container-apps