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.
Technical Excellence and Engineering Practices
Practices and cultural habits that maintain high engineering standards across teams. Topics include establishing and enforcing code review standards, testing strategies, continuous integration and delivery practices, documentation norms, knowledge sharing, learning culture, and measurable engineering health metrics. Also includes approaches to mentor engineers, build technical competency across the team, and structure learning programs that raise the whole organization.
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 Innovation and Problem Solving
Focuses on the candidate's approach to driving technical innovation and solving hard problems. Topics include evaluating new technologies, running experiments and prototypes, measuring success and de risking adoption, frameworks for problem decomposition and hypothesis driven development, collaborating across teams to incubate and scale ideas, and balancing exploratory work with delivery commitments. Candidates should provide concrete examples including decision criteria trade offs considered operational cost and long term maintenance and how impact was measured.