Practice - An actionable pattern, technique, or process employed by software professionals.
This repository is an opinionated list of practices that high-performing software development teams can follow. We've organized these practices based on DORA Capabilities to piggyback off of their exhaustive research over the past decade. By focusing on practices that support these research-backed capabilities, we aim to give readers many actionable opportunities to grow their skills and fine-tune their processes in areas that are likely to positively impact the organizations they work with.
Not every practice we include will be beneficial in every situation. Each unique situation is rife with nuance. Our curated list is designed to include practices that typically work and are in support a given DORA Capability. Our goal is to ensure that teams always have fresh, pragmatic, and actionable ideas on how they can improve.
At Pragmint, we rely on this resource to onboard new team members and focus our Co-Dev Coaching efforts.
- Code Maintainability
- Documentation Quality
- Empowering Teams To Choose Tools
- Generative Organizational Culture
- Job Satisfaction
- Learning Culture
- Team Experimentation
- Transformational Leadership
- Well-Being
- Continuous Delivery
- Database Change Management
- Deployment Automation
- Flexible Infrastructure
- Loosely Coupled Teams
- Streamline Change Approval
- Trunk-Based Development
- Version Control
- Visual Management
- Work in Process Limits
- Working in Small Batches
- Continuous Integration
- Customer Feedback
- Monitoring and Observability
- Monitoring Systems to Inform Business Decisions
- Pervasive Security
- Proactive Failure Notification
- Test Automation
- Test Data Management
- Visibility of Work in the Value Stream
Teams can take this assessment to identify areas where there are significant gaps in capability adoption.
Reading and learning alone won't create lasting change. It's important to experiment with each practice. Each team has a different mix of skills, experiences, and constraints. So, a one-size-fits-all approach tends to feel heavyweight. It's helpful to set time aside to earnestly experiment with new practices, then keep what works and throw out what doesn't. Understand that just because a practice doesn't work for one team doesn't mean it has no value for other teams. Our goal with this repository is to list practices that tend to work for most teams.
If you're a tech leader, exposing your teams to this resource may be a helpful first step for them. However, certain teams may be less experienced or less willing to experiment, leading to a lack of lasting change. In those cases, you may want to consider starting a Co-Dev Coaching practice of your own. Pragmint can help.
Our repository is always evolving. You can add to it by reviewing our contributors guide then raising an issue or submitting a pull request. Given this repository is meant to represent the opinions of Pragmint, our maintainers reserve the right to approve or reject any and all suggestions. However, we welcome contributions as they represent opportunities to broaden our horizons and interact with the broader community. Any contributions to this repository are subject to the Creative Commons License so that anyone in the community can benefit from the ideas contained in this repository.