Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Technical Debt and Trade Offs
Framing technical debt and trade offs in business terms and facilitating pragmatic decisions between short term delivery and long term maintainability. Cover how to identify types of technical debt, build business cases for refactoring or infrastructure work, negotiate allocation of sprint capacity, quantify risks, and track debt reduction over time. Also include communication techniques to help product and engineering stakeholders understand the technical and business consequences of deferring technical work while preserving team health.
Continuous Improvement and Technical Debt
Techniques for identifying process and engineering inefficiencies, designing experiments to improve outcomes, and balancing short term delivery with long term code health. Topics include diagnosing root causes of low velocity or plateaus, using retrospectives to generate improvement initiatives, tracking follow through on action items, measuring impact of changes, recognizing technical debt and its effect on morale and throughput, and facilitating prioritization conversations with product and engineering stakeholders to address debt responsibly.
Technical Fluency for Agile Practitioners
Assesses working knowledge of software engineering practices and how they affect planning, predictability, and quality. Expect to describe software development fundamentals such as testing strategies, code review practices, deployment pipelines, observability, technical debt management, and architectural patterns relevant to modern web applications. This topic includes continuous integration and continuous deployment practices, quality engineering approaches, and how to configure and use agile project tracking tools to surface metrics. You may be asked how to collaborate with architects and engineers on sprint planning, map and mitigate technical dependencies across teams, and translate engineering constraints into realistic delivery plans.