Accelerate Engineering with Golden Paths

The concept of the Golden Path is a trend that has been seriously catching on in recent years.

At ClearRoute we strongly believe in giving agile autonomous teams the freedom to innovate with new tools and technology. It is proven to be the most effective approach to building high-performing teams and delivering the most value to your organisation.

This freedom does come with a cost, it can cause fragmented ecosystems with operations teams becoming stretched supporting all the tools and languages. On the counter side, a heavily prescriptive organisation suffers from developer inefficiency. Teams spend weeks waiting for ‘secured and approved’ tools or software.

Golden Paths allow for a happy medium for both engineering and the business through a set of fully supported, recommended sets of templated decisions. It provides structure and removes non-value-add tasks from developers. Teams are able to retain their autonomy but stay within the guardrails of the organisation.

Teams are not forced to walk the Golden Path but because it’s so straightforward, they would need a significant reason to consider deviating.

For example, maybe the business would prefer teams to build micro-service architectures using AWS Lambda with NodeJS.

Fortunately, there is a Golden Path template. Therefore, the team will get the AWS Cloud Formation files, the repository, the CI/CD pipeline as code, the test approach, hello world framework and ops support embedded in and all for free.

In short, you can start developing valuable, production code within minutes!

As a result, over time naturally, the Golden Paths drive consensus across the engineering teams and engineers become more cross-functional as they become used to seeing the same tools and patterns.

For organisations looking to partner with Clear Route and implement Golden Paths we can help. you to

Identify

We will initially want to capture a baseline of your engineering team’s developer experience. This will enable us to be objective with the success of Golden Path implementations

Measuring will provide the insights and the data needed for us to understand what the first Golden Path candidate might look like

Implement

Working alongside your existing tools and teams we will build a generic, developer-centric golden path ready to be adopted.

Adopt

Once built, we need to make the Path accessible to the teams. We prefer to do this by using a Developer Hub but other options are available if preferred.

Clear Route have found the best way to onboard early teams is for us to embed inside feature teams working to migrate existing repositories. This allows for incredibly fast feedback and is the most efficient way to improve usability.

Scale

After a few teams have been onboarded and the path is demonstrating high value, It’s time to scale!

Using the data from the beginning of the engagement allows us to demonstrate why teams would use the Paths and the benefits the teams will enjoy.

Benefits

A Golden Path greatly reduces the friction and effort it takes for development teams to start and continue to build software. It helps organisations guide developers onto strategic platforms without enforcing or restricting their creativity/freedom.

In addition to these core benefits, you can expect the following by implementing effective Golden Paths:

• Developers become familiar with the consistent tools, technologies, templates and patterns allowing for greater flexibility and rotation of engineering resources.
• Security is greatly improved, templates and libraries can be patched at a single point and propagated across all engineering teams.
• Teams still feel empowered to make new technology choices, but will be tasked with supporting them.
• Operations teams can work more efficiently supporting a common set of tools and technologies.
• When coupled with a Developer Hub governance can be baked into templates providing insights such as service owner and production readiness.
• There is a significant reduction in the time it takes development teams to start being productive, allowing the business to realise business value much sooner.

For teams looking to take advantage of Golden Paths then feel free to get in contact so we can discuss further.