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.
Code Quality and Engineering Practices
Addresses practices for maintaining and improving code quality while delivering features. Topics include code review standards, testing strategies such as unit testing, integration testing and end to end testing, test automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery, static analysis and linting, refactoring practices, and technical debt management. Also covers how to balance shipping speed with long term maintainability, how to measure quality and when to prioritize debt repayment versus new work, and how to communicate quality tradeoffs to nontechnical stakeholders.
Code Quality and Technical Debt Management
Covers practices for writing readable, maintainable, and correct code and for managing long term code health. Topics include error handling, automated and manual testing, code review practices, refactoring and optimization, style and readability, continuous improvement, identification and quantification of technical debt, prioritization of pay down activities versus feature delivery, and measuring the impact of remediation efforts. Candidates should be able to explain decision criteria for when refactoring is worth the investment and how to institutionalize improvements.
Balancing Innovation and Operational Stability
Describe frameworks for balancing investment in new features or technologies with maintaining operational stability and managing technical debt. Cover criteria for when to invest refactor or preserve legacy systems testing and rollout strategies rollback plans and how to communicate trade offs risks and cost to stakeholders.
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.
Technical Excellence and Platform Health
Focuses on the practices and trade offs involved in maintaining long term platform sustainability and engineering quality. Areas assessed include technical debt identification and prioritization, strategies for refactoring and incremental improvement, code quality and testing practices, observability and monitoring that enable fast detection and recovery, service level objectives and incident management approaches, and alignment of maintenance work with business objectives. Candidates should be able to articulate how they balance short term feature delivery with long term health, how they measure and track platform indicators, and how they influence cross team processes to sustain reliability and developer productivity.