Engineering Playbook

Mighty Acorn Digital's playbook of engineering best practices for building and maintaining high-quality digital services for state and local governments.

Make small, incremental changes

Keep changes to a size that's fast to make and easy to review.

Make communication part of your job

Be deliberate and clear in your communication to improve alignment and make your ideas more successful.

Build reproducible environments

Use infrastructure as code, containerization, and other tools to ensure that development, testing, and production environments are consistent and reproducible.

Make the deployment process predictable and fast

Use automation and well-defined approval processes to reduce the overhead and risk of releasing code.

Separate deployment from release

Give business stakeholders control over when new features become visible to users to de-risk code deployment.

Make it reusable after you've validated the need

Increase quality and speed of development by creating reusable components and patterns and leveraging them often. Don't stress reusability or perfection before validating the need.

Build direct relationships and don't play telephone

Improve outcomes by engaging directly with stakeholders and members of other teams.

Designate a team member to be interruptible, and rotate the responsibility

Support, triage, and incident response can be disruptive to engineering work. By designating a team member to handle interruptions, the rest of the team can focus on delivering value.

Prefer audit trails and peer reviews to access restrictions

Security is important, but overly restrictive access controls can hinder productivity. For frequently used systems, focus on creating robust audit trails and break-glass procedures to ensure accountability while maintaining flexibility.

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