An engineering workflow is a set of carefully designed smaller work processes that define a larger, broader work process. These days, most organizations rely on software to help manage their essential engineering workflows and to optimize those systems. These software systems help administrators keep tight control over reviews, approvals, and deliverables – while helping to manage document actions correctly at each step without the need for a human to drive or oversee each task.
Optimizing Your Engineering Workflow for Maximum Efficiency
As part of a process of finding and refining an effective engineering workflow, teams must observe how they currently do things. This helps to identify any areas where the current system is causing friction for engineers and where the team may be wasting time, money or resources.
Once this observation phase is complete, teams can then begin the process of designing a new and more efficient engineering workflow. This may involve identifying and mapping the critical steps in the current workflow, including where and how each process is broken down into different functions (like new feature work, bug remediation, tech debt reduction) and how they are interconnected.
Another key component in this phase is to find the exact ‘percentage progress’ of each workflow step and how that progress is measured. This can be done by identifying the number of completed tasks and comparing that to the number of required or outstanding tasks.
In order to maintain a robust and resilient data pipeline, engineering workflows need to be reviewed, documented and updated regularly. This includes implementing unit tests and integration tests to ensure the integrity of all components of the data pipeline. It also involves incorporating detailed code comments and creating diagrams to help future troubleshooting.