What is the Development Practices Radar?
The Development Practices Radar is a short health check for software teams. Your team rates six statements on a five-point scale from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree: scope is clear, coding standards are agreed and followed, people have time to focus, technical debt is monitored and managed, time-consuming and high-stakes features have automated tests, and deployment is automated and reliable. Six dimensions keep it quick enough to run every quarter, and a weak spot is easy to see. If Ability to Focus scores low across the team, that's a specific problem to raise with whoever sets priorities. Use the results to agree on one or two changes, then check at the next run whether they stuck.
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 your engineering team wants a shared view of how solid its day-to-day practices are.
- In a retrospective or quarterly review, to find where friction is slowing delivery.
- When a new team forms, to set a baseline for coding standards, testing and deployment.
- Across several check-ins, to see whether development practices are improving.
Tips & tricks
- Run it anonymously so people answer candidly about scope, focus and technical debt.
- Compare results across squads to find practices worth sharing or standardizing.
- Spend each retrospective on the one or two lowest-scoring dimensions. Trying to fix all six at once rarely sticks.
- Re-run the radar each quarter to see trends and check that agreed improvements are holding.