Sharpen the way your team builds and ships software
Strong engineering teams are built on consistent, well-understood development practices. The Development Practices Radar gives software teams a structured way to reflect on how they plan, build, test, and ship their work. By rating dimensions such as scope clarity, coding standards, technical debt, testing, and deployment, teams surface where their craft is solid and where friction is slowing them down. Use the results to spark honest conversations, agree on improvements, and track how your development practices mature over time.
Dimensions
Development Practices
Core engineering practices that influence how effectively the team plans, builds, tests, and delivers quality software.
Clarity of Scope
Our scope of work is clear and well-defined.
- Scope is unclear
- Scope is mostly clear
- Scope is well-defined
Shared Coding Standards
We have an agreed set of coding standards that are defined and adhered to.
- No shared standards
- Standards exist but vary
- Standards followed consistently
Ability to Focus
We have the time and opportunity to focus on the work we have planned.
- Constantly interrupted
- Some focus time
- Protected focus time
Managing Technical Debt
We monitor and manage our technical debt.
- Debt is ignored
- Debt tracked occasionally
- Debt actively managed
Testing Practices
We have functional test automation for time consuming, high stake features.
- Mostly manual testing
- Partial automation
- Robust test automation
Deployment Process
We have automated deployment that is reliable and quality assured.
- Manual, risky deploys
- Partly automated deploys
- Reliable automated deploys
When to use this health check
- When an engineering team wants a shared view of how strong their day-to-day development practices are.
- During a retrospective or quarterly review to identify where craft and delivery friction exist.
- When onboarding a new team and establishing a baseline for coding standards, testing, and deployment.
- To track improvement in development practices over time across multiple check-ins.
Tips & tricks
- Run the check anonymously to encourage candid responses about scope, focus, and technical debt.
- Compare results across squads to spot practices worth sharing or standardizing.
- Focus each retrospective on the one or two lowest-scoring dimensions rather than trying to fix everything at once.
- Re-run the radar each quarter to visualize trends and confirm that agreed improvements are sticking.