ISE Engineering Fundamentals Playbook

An engineer working for a ISE project...

Has responsibilities to their team – mentor, coach, and lead.
Knows their playbook. Follows their playbook. Fixes their playbook if it is broken. If they find a better playbook, they copy it. If somebody could use their playbook, they share it.
Leads by example. Models the behaviors we desire both interpersonally and technically.
Strives to understand how their work fits into a broader context and ensures the outcome.

This is our playbook. All contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request to get involved.

Why Have a Playbook

To increase overall efficiency for team members and the whole team in general.
To reduce the number of mistakes and avoid common pitfalls.
To strive to be better engineers and learn from other people's shared experience.

If you do nothing else follow the Engineering Fundamentals Checklist!

The first week of an ISE project is a breakdown of the sections of the playbook according to the structure of an Agile sprint.

Keep the code quality bar high.
Value quality and precision over ‘getting things done’.
Work diligently on the one important thing.
As a distributed team take time to share context via wiki, teams and backlog items.
Make the simple thing work now. Build fewer features today, but ensure they work amazingly. Then add more features tomorrow.
Avoid adding scope to a backlog item, instead add a new backlog item.
Our goal is to ship incremental customer value.
Keep backlog item details up to date to communicate the state of things with the rest of your team.
Report product issues found and provide clear and repeatable engineering feedback!
We all own our code and each one of us has an obligation to make all parts of the solution great.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidelines.

Last update: August 22, 2024