When you develop software, there are multiple ways to do it. It can be similar to scribbling a business plan on the back of a napkin vs a top consulting firm presentation.
However, a mature engineering process will render long-term results. Therefore, a CTO or a Technical Lead has this direction to follow.
- Architecture and Design: This guideline focuses on establishing a solid architectural and design foundation for your e-commerce platform. It includes defining and documenting technical and functional requirements, identifying the right architecture and design patterns, creating a comprehensive data model, and selecting the appropriate tools and technologies.
- Testing / Quality Assurance: This guideline emphasizes the importance of testing throughout the development lifecycle to ensure the quality and reliability of the platform. It includes implementing automated testing, conducting functional and non-functional testing, and performing performance testing to optimize the platform’s speed and responsiveness.
- DevOps: This guideline focuses on improving collaboration between development and operations teams by automating the software development and deployment process. It includes implementing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), adopting infrastructure-as-code (IAC), and leveraging containerization and orchestration tools like Kubernetes.
- Security: This guideline focuses on ensuring the security of your e-commerce platform by identifying and mitigating potential security risks. It includes implementing security best practices, performing regular security audits and vulnerability scans, and enforcing access control policies.
- Monitoring and Analytics / Observability: This guideline focuses on ensuring the stability and performance of your e-commerce platform by implementing robust monitoring and analytics capabilities. It includes setting up real-time monitoring and alerting, logging and tracing, and leveraging data analytics tools to gain insights into platform usage and performance.
- Continuous Improvement: This guideline emphasizes the importance of continuously improving your e-commerce platform to meet changing business and customer needs. It includes setting up feedback mechanisms, conducting regular retrospectives, and adopting a continuous improvement mindset to drive innovation and growth.
- Agile Development: This guideline focuses on adopting an Agile development methodology that enables your team to deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently. It includes adopting Agile principles, implementing Agile ceremonies, and using Agile tools like user stories, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
- Code Quality: This guideline emphasizes the importance of maintaining high code quality throughout the development process. It includes enforcing coding standards, conducting code reviews, and using code analysis tools to identify and address code smells, performance bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities.
- Version Control: This guideline focuses on implementing a robust version control system to manage code changes and ensure code integrity. It includes using a Git-based version control system, establishing a branching and merging strategy, and enforcing a code review process for all code changes.
- Continuous Integration and Deployment: This guideline focuses on implementing a CI/CD pipeline to automate the software build, test, and deployment process. It includes setting up a build server, implementing automated testing and code analysis, and automating the deployment process to production environments.
- Documentation: This guideline emphasizes the importance of documenting your software development process, including technical and user documentation. It includes creating technical specifications, user guides, and API documentation, and using a documentation tool like Swagger to ensure consistency and accuracy.
- Release Management: This guideline focuses on establishing a robust release management process to manage the deployment of new version releases to multiple tenants. It includes establishing a release calendar, implementing a release packaging process, and conducting user acceptance testing (UAT) prior to release. It includes implementing a canary release process, conducting extensive testing on a small subset of tenants before full deployment, and establishing clear rollback policies in case of issues.
- Versioning: This guideline emphasizes the importance of versioning your software to manage new feature releases and ensure backward compatibility. It includes following a semantic versioning scheme, clearly documenting version changes and backward compatibility policies, and ensuring that all components of the system adhere to the same versioning policy.
- Dependency Management: This guideline focuses on managing dependencies across different components of the system to ensure compatibility and minimize risks of failure during version upgrades. It includes implementing a dependency management system, clearly documenting dependencies and compatibility requirements, and regularly reviewing and updating dependencies to maintain system health.
In case you need to ensure backward compatibility, you can focus on ensuring backward compatibility of the system after a new version release. It includes conducting extensive testing to ensure that new versions do not break backward compatibility, using automated testing tools to speed up the testing process, and establishing clear policies for managing backward compatibility issues.
Decide which are important for your organisation and act upon them.
