Foster a Culture of Reuse With Golden Paths

As an Engineering department grows and the number of digital products built increases, fragmentation in approaches and technologies can begin to appear. A Golden Path allows engineering teams to follow a supported path, allowing for teams to build more quickly and efficiently.

Organisations that fail to implement one can expect the following issues to arise:

• Multiple solutions to the same problem – Teams without guardrails or enough information are likely to duplicate work.
• A wide range of languages & frameworks – Teams will use the tooling they are familiar with, causing a wide spread of technologies to hire for and support.
• Long build and release times – As engineers re-invent the wheel, getting digital products and features out the door will be slower.

ClearRoute Engineers have been working closely on perfecting the Developer Experience inside some of the most complex environments. We have helped our clients achieve a 20% increase in developer capacity through our work in Developer Experience and Golden Paths.

We strongly believe in giving agile autonomous teams the freedom to innovate with new tools and technology.

However, this freedom does come with a cost. It can cause a fragmented ecosystem, operations teams can become stretched, and hiring & training new engineers take longer. 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 facilitates a happy medium for engineers and the business through fully supported, recommended sets of templated decisions. It provides structure and removes non-value-add tasks from developers. Teams can now easily retain their autonomy but stay within the guardrails of the organisation. Teams do not have to walk the Golden Path, but because it is so straightforward, they are unlikely to consider deviating without a good reason.

For example, the business would prefer teams to build micro-service architectures using AWS Lambda with NodeJS. Fortunately, there is a Golden Path. Therefore, the team will get the AWS Cloud Formation files, the repository, the CI/CD pipeline as code, the test approach, and a standardised documentation structure. All supported, tested & best of all for the teams, completely free!

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

As a result, the Golden Paths drive consensus across the engineering teams. 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

Initially, we will capture a baseline of your Developer Experience. Then we can be objective about the success of the Golden Path.

Additionally, measuring will provide the insights and data needed for us to understand what the first Golden Path may be.

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 with a Developer Hub, but other options are available.

Clear Route have found the best way to onboard the first few teams is for us to embed inside feature teams. Allowing for fast feedback is the most efficient way to improve usability.

Scale

Once the initial teams have been onboarded and demonstrated value, It’s time to scale!

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

Benefits

A Golden Path 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, and templates and libraries can be patched at a single point and propagated across all engineering teams.
• Teams still feel empowered and able to choose technologies but will be tasked with supporting them.
• Operations teams can work more efficiently by supporting ubiquitous tools and technologies.
• When coupled with a Developer Hub, we can bake governance 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.

How We Can Help

Here at ClearRoute, we are excited by recent industry trends taking a new look at the Developer Experience. At the forefront of this is the adoption of Golden Paths, allowing teams to create a pre-defined path to adopt. With our experience spanning Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms & Release Automation, we can help you develop an opinionated and supported Route to Live:

• Build a Project – Allow teams to get started quicker with pre-defined KanBan board structures, MicroService templates, logging libraries and more.
• Checks & Balances – Define your organisational standards as automated checks & balances. Allow teams to self-validate rather than rely on many external teams.
• Supportive Tooling – Provide teams with reusable tools that may solve specific domain problems. One example is offering your teams with front-end systems a standardised way to serve static content.

A Golden Path will allow for new products to be created faster, reduce costly duplication of effort and encourage organisational standards in a developer-friendly way.

ClearRoute Engineers have been working closely on perfecting the Developer Experience inside some of the most complex environments. We have helped our clients achieve a 20% increase in developer capacity through our work in Developer Experience and Golden Paths.