By: Tracy Kemp
Engineering effectiveness (EE) is an important component of our company's "shift-left" strategy. EE—sometimes referred to as developer tooling, engineering infrastructure or builder experience—is, as the name implies, all about increasing the productivity, efficiency and quality of teams.
EE primarily focuses on those activities in the early stages—or "left side"—of the software development life cycle (SDLC). EE takes the definition of quality and embodies it in off-the-shelf services, custom libraries and automation. From developing tools to verify open-source compliance to providing additional training that helps ensure solution architecture gets the most out of a cloud provider, EE enables software engineers by injecting the tools and processes that product development teams use to continuously improve. Just as critical, it allows them to keep a razor-sharp focus on the business problems they are charged with solving.
Our organization recognized a need to address some higher-level but common pain points across our product teams such as standardized linting policies, cloud infrastructure knowledge and "secure by design" principles. However, our product teams were highly focused on delivering and meeting their business goals; solving those operational problems didn't take priority, and progress stagnated. Multiply these same issues over "X" number of teams, and they quickly bubble into much larger problems if not addressed.
The challenge that enterprise software teams encounter is that we can't expect our teams to meet ever-increasing business demand while also finding the time for extra research, learning and practicing new skills. In their book, Team Topologies (via Forrester), authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais importantly note that an enabling team is "composed of specialists in a given technical (or product) domain, and they help bridge any capability gaps. Enabling teams can cross-cut the stream-aligned teams and have the required bandwidth to research, try out options and make informed suggestions on adequate tooling, practices, frameworks and any of the ecosystem choices around the application stack. [This] allows the stream-aligned team to acquire and evolve capabilities without having to invest the associated effort."
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