Eight Core Questions of an Engineering System: Is the “Highway” for Value Delivery Unblocked?

CI/CD tools: Are you using collaboration-encouraging GitLab/GitHub, or gate-after-gate Gerrit/Jenkins?
Approval process: How many layers of boss sign-offs does a merge request (MR) need before it can pass?
Environment isolation: Do you have separate Dev/Test/Prod environments? Can you switch and deploy with one click?
Deployment pipeline: From finishing the code to being visible to users, how many steps does it take? Is it automated, or manual?
Monitoring system: Can alerts directly point to the root cause, or do engineers have to manually dig through logs at midnight?
Configuration management: Is it centralized management that supports canary releases, or is it scattered throughout the code and modified manually?
Test coverage: Do you have a reliable automated testing “immune system,” or do you treat bugs as features and let production users test for you?
Rollback mechanism: When the production service “blows up,” can you roll back calmly within 5 minutes, or does the whole team need to stay up all night to “go down with the ship”?

CI/CD tools: Are you using collaboration-encouraging GitLab/GitHub, or gate-after-gate Gerrit/Jenkins?
Approval process: How many layers of boss sign-offs does a merge request (MR) need before it can pass?
Environment isolation: Do you have separate Dev/Test/Prod environments? Can you switch and deploy with one click?
Deployment pipeline: From finishing the code to being visible to users, how many steps does it take? Is it automated, or manual?
Monitoring system: Can alerts directly point to the root cause, or do engineers have to manually dig through logs at midnight?
Configuration management: Is it centralized management that supports canary releases, or is it scattered throughout the code and modified manually?
Test coverage: Do you have a reliable automated testing “immune system,” or do you treat bugs as features and let production users test for you?
Rollback mechanism: When the production service “blows up,” can you roll back calmly within 5 minutes, or does the whole team need to stay up all night to “go down with the ship”?