🧭 Engineering Best Practices: Complete Playbook & Curriculum Index
Welcome to the Engineering Best Practices master curriculum. This comprehensive playbook translates real-world software engineering rigor into actionable, phased guides covering the entire lifecycle: planning with RFCs and ADRs, standardized development workflows, automated testing pyramids, progressive shipping with feature flags, and long-term production maintenance.
Every guide in this series strictly follows a two-part learning format:
- ⚡ Quick Dive: Phase matrices, checklists, and template summaries for rapid reference.
- 📖 Extended Guide: Complete markdown templates (RFC/ADR/Runbook), YAML configurations, migration patterns, and production architectures.
📚 Curriculum Roadmap
| # | Phase | Guide | Primary Topics Covered |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Phase 1 | Planning, Design Docs & ADRs | Written RFC / Design Doc templates, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) in MADR format, C4 architectural diagrams, and milestone scoping. |
| 02 | Phase 2 | Development, Code Reviews & Static Analysis | DevContainers (devcontainer.json), PR review etiquette (<300 LoC), automated code formatting, pre-commit quality gates, and SAST scanning (SonarQube/CodeQL). |
| 03 | Phase 3 | Testing Strategies & Preview Environments | Testing pyramid economics, Test-Driven Development (TDD), ephemeral PR preview environments, test data factories, and distributed load testing with k6. |
| 04 | Phase 4 | Shipping, Progressive Delivery & Feature Flags | Decoupling deployment from release, Canary rollouts (1% $\to$ 100%), Blue-Green deployments, Feature Flags (Unleash/LaunchDarkly), and structured telemetry. |
| 05 | Phase 5 | Maintenance, Runbooks & Zero-Downtime Migrations | Operational Runbook templates, 4-phase Expand/Contract zero-downtime database migrations, Sentry error triage, and the 20% technical debt rule. |
✅ Master Engineering Lifecycle Checklist
- [x] Planning: Approved Design Doc & ADR logged before writing code.
- [x] Development: Containerized Dev environment & automated pre-commit linters.
- [x] Testing: Unit + Integration tests with Testcontainers & PR preview deployments.
- [x] Shipping: Feature flagged dark launch & progressive canary deployment.
- [x] Maintenance: Monitored via OpenTelemetry with actionable Runbooks & zero-downtime migrations.