Engineering Excellence has been defined as the application of best practices that enable the development of systems that are well-designed, reliable, efficient, and secure and which ultimately drive business value. However, we believe Engineering Excellence isn’t just about technical proficiency. In this article we highlight a rounded approach to Engineering Excellence encompassing culture and linked to business outcomes which we have been applying to deliver successful business transformations for two decades.

It starts and ends with the business…

Technology is simply a means to an end, and ultimately all initiatives must align to driving business value for any organisation. For Engineering Excellence to be effective it must therefore be inextricably linked to business outcomes. At Version 1, we use our Evolve business transformation framework to ensure we remain focused on the bigger picture – implementing solutions that solve real problems.

This framework places a heavy emphasis on alignment to business needs and incorporates our unique Business Value Assessment tool to facilitate effective backlog prioritisation and therefore maximise the value delivered.

Addressing user needs

In a similar vein, an implementation can be technically excellent but if you don’t understand your user’s needs, the end result is still a digital transformation failure. User Centered Design is therefore critical to success. Too often, we see application development and modernisation initiatives being approached as technology led solutions, with the implementation being driven solely by IT and little to no emphasis being placed on (re)aligning to user needs. The best outcomes always involve both business and IT stakeholders coming together to drive a holistic solution outcome.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Creating a culture of Engineering Excellence is critical, yet it is one of the hardest things to achieve in business. And no matter what strategy or technology choices you put in place, if you don’t have the appropriate environment that supports a culture of continuous learning, of innovation and striving for technical excellence, then any success will be limited. We have invested significantly in a dedicated Developer Experience team who focus on defining standards and creating the environment needed for our teams to flourish, including:

  1. Creation of an Engineering Excellence framework that ensures we take a long term view on our approach and the activities required
  2. The establishment of ~20 Technical Communities with over 1,800 members where like minded individuals can share knowledge and learnings
  3. Organisation of 120+ events annually including Code Katas, Problem Solving Challenges and local innovation initiatives where we celebrate our teams and hone our skills
  4. Creation of an annual developer survey we run internally which informs our investment decisions
  5. Continuous evaluation of tooling such as AI coding assistants for our teams to use
  6. Development of a standardised productivity framework which enables us to measure performance and quality across teams to drive the right outcomes
  7. Driving participation in global coding competitions such as the Advent of Code where our developers are routinely hitting the top 10 in the world

Creating an environment which encourages curiosity and innovation is so important to ensuring your teams can reach their potential. There’s no silver bullet but we as engineers need to remember that what we do is more than just a day job, it’s a craft. It’s through dedication to the craft and having a real passion for engineering that creates the appropriate culture.

Measuring Productivity, and happiness

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Using the SPACE framework as a basis, we have created a Developer Productivity framework which we use to measure five key dimensions. Our teams use this to capture project activity, including code quality and stability.

 

This not only allows us to measure productivity and adjust delivery processes accordingly to drive efficiencies, but it also allows us to gain a measure of Developer Happiness and to understand how well our teams are collaborating.

The importance of diversity

Embedding diversity into teams reduces the risk of group think and enables a more rounded perspective and approach is taken in the solution implementation to drive better outcomes. An excellent example of this was when we recently developed an application modernisation solution for a customer in 2023 to re-platform them from Xamarin to React Native. The project team was resourced from four of our office locations across the world with a strong focus on gender and ethnic diversity.

Ultimately, this allowed us to deliver a solution implementation that was completed successfully within 3 months and with the project team consistently called out for Excellence by the customer.

Golden Paths lay foundations for success

Golden Paths, also known as Paved Roads, are a fundamental ingredient of Internal Developer Platforms and Platform Engineering, which is a trend that has become very popular in the IT industry recently. Golden Paths represent best practice opinionated templates that development teams can use to not only accelerate delivery but to codify standards and put in place guardrails that protect your business from the vagaries of individual development team preferences.

Ultimately, this enables you to move from the situation of constantly reinventing the wheel to a standardised and templated approach which becomes more supportable.
This approach also allows the knowledge and expertise of your most senior engineers to be shared more easily, providing an excellent platform from which junior engineers can learn what Engineering Excellence looks like.

Using our depth of expertise and experience in software engineering, and reflecting our commitment to our customers, we built an Azure Cloud Native Development Accelerator, which incorporated Engineering Excellence best practices into a solution template that not only accelerated delivery but ensured best practice outcomes.

What’s included:

The accelerator automated provisioning of environments using Infrastructure as Code and applied Shift Left principles to the Software Development process through best practice CI/CD pipelines that incorporated code quality checks, test automation and analysis of non-functional requirements such as Accessibility, Security and Performance:

Best Practice DevSecOps pipelines

We also incorporated Secure By Design principles and guardrails directly into the template:

Secure By Design guardrails

Ultimately, this accelerator codified our opinion of how to build best practice cloud native applications, focusing on the “Sprint 0” Non-Functional Requirements implementation, meaning our teams could more quickly focus on the business requirements.

Next Generation Development

We are leaders in AI technology implementations, and have deployed Generative AI solutions to production which have saved our customers millions. This expertise was recently recognised by the industry analyst ISG, when we were ranked as Leader in the 2024 AWS Data Analytics, AI and ML category.

We’re bringing that expertise to bear in defining what a forward looking Engineering capability will look like.

Tools like GitHub, CoPilot and Amazon Q are now part of the toolkit having been trialled successfully earlier this year. You can read the full report here.

We’ve also built internal tooling such as Decipher which is our Generative AI solution for analysing, understanding and auto documenting legacy systems to support our customer’s modernisation objectives.

 

Version 1 Decipher – AI powered code insights and documentation solution

Ultimately, we see that GenAI will become another element of our Engineering Excellence story, accelerating and enabling the software development lifecycle:

 

Generative AI – impact on SDLC

Global Recognition of our Engineering Capability

Version 1 won the Microsoft Global Partner of The Year award for Modernising Applications, 2023 for the delivery of the NILO project for National Highways. This hugely significant award was recognition of our differentiated approach. Placing a strong emphasis on the business outcomes and user needs, we used our Cloud Native Development Accelerator to implement a solution in just over three months which made incident reporting times 150% faster and increased incident closure efficiency by 82%. This delivery embodied all aspects of our approach to Engineering Excellence with global recognition.

We were also finalists for 2024’s Global Inclusion Changemaker Award based on an intuitive application we developed for The National Museum of Computing. The app enables a tailored museum experience for people who are neurodiverse – the museum uses the app for inclusive events such as Relaxed Openings (quiet events to support people with additional needs).

Summary

There’s no silver bullet to implementing Engineering Excellence, and the right mix of ingredients may vary across organisations. But it starts with small steps and the intent and commitment to creating that culture. And the reality is that you will never be “done”. So, remember, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey.

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