Developer Excellence: A Practical Checklist

Why a checklist?

High‑performing teams win by making the right thing the easy thing. This practical checklist helps you ship quickly without compromising quality, security, or maintainability.

How to use it

• Adopt it incrementally (per repo or per team).
• Automate wherever possible (CI, bots, templates).
• Review quarterly to reflect new constraints and lessons.

1) Code Health

• Small, composable modules with explicit interfaces
• Naming reflects intent; avoid leaks and magic globals
• Tests for critical paths (unit + integration where it hurts to break)
• Dead code deleted; feature flags pruned

2) Delivery & Process

• Trunk‑based or short‑lived branches; PRs under ~300 lines
• CI is fast and reliable; flaky tests are treated as incidents
• Feature flags for safe, incremental releases
• Rollback plan documented for risky changes

3) Reliability & Observability

• Structured logs with correlation IDs; traces on critical flows
• SLOs and dashboards for latency, error rate, saturation
• Alerts with owner and runbooks; postmortems are blameless but thorough

4) Security & Compliance

• Least privilege for secrets and infra; rotate tokens
• Dependency scanning and patch cadence; pinned versions for critical libs
• Input/output validation; avoid injection and unsafe deserialization

5) Performance & Cost

• P95/p99 budgets defined; regressions fail the build or trigger flags
• Use the right data structures; measure before optimizing
• Cost by feature or tenant monitored; noisy features get budgets

6) Collaboration & Review

• PR templates with context, screenshots, and risk notes
• Checklists for reviewers (correctness, readability, tests, docs)
• Async first: clear RFCs, ADRs, and decisions visible to all

7) Tooling & Automation

• One‑command setup; reproducible local environment
• Precommit hooks for format/lint/typecheck; CI enforces the same
• Make common tasks scripts (migrate, seed, smoke, profile)

8) Docs & Runbooks

• Living README per service; up‑to‑date env & deploy notes
• Oncall runbooks for major components; known issues list
• Architecture map (system + data flows) updated when topology changes

Anti‑patterns to avoid

• “Smart” code without tests or owners
• Long‑running feature branches; giant PRs
• Mystery env vars and tribal knowledge

Use this checklist to enable speed with safety. If you want a tailored version for your stack (SaaS, AI products & automations), get in touch at contact@risegravity.com.