Excellent article; thank you. I have written similarly in my notes, focused on the code maintainability (or component quality) part, but not in a shareable format yet. It is a sort of maturity model (I hope eventually to turn it into a grid with practices on the left side and levels across the top, so the RH column is near-ideal behaviors personally and organizationally). But the concept begins with a self-code review for each commit or PR, followed a code review from someone else (who ideally was not part of the design discussion) who asks questions like: is this code easily understood for a new maintainer? would I want to maintain this? How was it tested? Is any coordination in order with other stakeholders, or does documenation need to be updated? Is it clear why the code exists and the tests do what they do?
And then improving over time. This came up for me after repeatedly encountering code that no one could understand but the original author ("bus count of one", or if one person gets hit by a bus we would be in trouble), or that was needlessly complex for the enjoyment of complexity (really), or that had tests where no one knew why they tested for certain behavior (until fortunately someone else came back from vacation after I was about to commit a change to the test). Etc, all for comprehensibility and maintainability, and reliability.
Ps: overall, this is one of the most enjoyable HN discussions I have seen.
pps: I also one started encouraging our team and others to maintain a set of wiki pages, listing all projects for which we were responsible, then for each one at least one simple page of documenation listing things like who are the stakeholders, where is the source code, any odd build or deployment steps, the key (one sentence) inputs and outputs, where it runs, who does backups of what, etc. Before that it was haphazard. This is short of a real ops manual and could be done better of course, and would change as other org. practices change, but it was far better than nothing, and could be created in 10 minutes from a template. Great for bringing new teammates on board. I think an organization should have something like that for the whole org, listing teams and each team having such a page, as well as listing everything essential that a new person should know rather than relying on haphazard cultural transmission. We had rules like "no new debt" that were well-adopted and began to slip out of the culture as new people joined.
And then improving over time. This came up for me after repeatedly encountering code that no one could understand but the original author ("bus count of one", or if one person gets hit by a bus we would be in trouble), or that was needlessly complex for the enjoyment of complexity (really), or that had tests where no one knew why they tested for certain behavior (until fortunately someone else came back from vacation after I was about to commit a change to the test). Etc, all for comprehensibility and maintainability, and reliability.
Ps: overall, this is one of the most enjoyable HN discussions I have seen.
pps: I also one started encouraging our team and others to maintain a set of wiki pages, listing all projects for which we were responsible, then for each one at least one simple page of documenation listing things like who are the stakeholders, where is the source code, any odd build or deployment steps, the key (one sentence) inputs and outputs, where it runs, who does backups of what, etc. Before that it was haphazard. This is short of a real ops manual and could be done better of course, and would change as other org. practices change, but it was far better than nothing, and could be created in 10 minutes from a template. Great for bringing new teammates on board. I think an organization should have something like that for the whole org, listing teams and each team having such a page, as well as listing everything essential that a new person should know rather than relying on haphazard cultural transmission. We had rules like "no new debt" that were well-adopted and began to slip out of the culture as new people joined.