Some Help Examining Your Engineering Practices

At Citerus, I worked with my colleagues to create a basic form we can use to take a quick inventory of the current engineering practices in the teams we work with. It was originally in Swedish, but I just translated it into English for use at a client.

We’re not dogmatic, so neither is the form. Nor do we think that anything goes, so there are lots of opinions built into the form. Use it at your own risk. The least it could do for you is to act as a conversation starter.

So, the form can get your team talking about engineering practices. There are many ways to use the form, and we don’t prescribe a specific way to use it. Among the ways I’ve heard it’s been used are these:

  • Someone used it as a thinking tool for himself
  • The members of two teams filled out the form individually, then got together to compare and discuss their answers
  • One team answered the questions together, and discussed as they went along
  • A manager used the example questions in each section to create a detailed questionnaire, and published it on a web based tool

The document is available as a share on Google Docs, from where we might update it from time to time. Google Docs isn’t very capable when it comes to formatting, so the lines and page breaks I’ve tried to put in might or might not work for you.

We’re publishing the document under this Creative Commons license:

Creative Commons License
Examine Your Engineering Practices by Tobias Fors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Here’s the form: Examine Your Engineering Practices

Published by Tobias Fors

I'm a software management consultant. I help other people succeed with software development. In my work, I help teams and organizations be more effective and ship software.

2 replies on “Some Help Examining Your Engineering Practices”

  1. Hi,

    Will you only publish the English version of the document, or is it possible to access the Swedish version as well? I am thinking that it might be easier to use if a team consists of just Swedes and consequently it might be easier to sell in the idea to use it at all.

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