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Empower Standards (ADR)

This page represents Empower definition of standards and how they are applied. This can be organization, technical or design decisions that we want the Empower engineering base to follow and comprehend. In the scope of this document, the term "Standard" or Architectural Decision Records (ADR) are used interchangeably throughout.

Documentation Overview​

  • Azure DevOps (ADO) Wiki:
    • Technical Engineering Documentation
    • Technical Operations (Releases, Troubleshooting, Configuration) Documentation
    • Technical Spikes relevant to within a particular pod
    • Available to read and edit by all pods and teams.
  • Internal Readme.io (This Wiki):
    • Onboarding Documentation
    • Standards and Decisions Documentation
    • Empower Technical High-level Documentation
    • Product Team Documentation
      • OKR
      • Features
      • Roadmaps
    • Readable by all pods, but Edits are gated to Product and Technical Pod Leads in an ad-hoc fashion.
  • Public Readme.io Wiki:
    • Empower related Public Documentation
      • Customer Onboarding
      • Data Connectors
      • Publicly available Roadmaps
      • Customer Integrations and Troubleshooting
    • Closely controlled by Product team and version controlled through a Product release process.

Definition of a Standard (ADR)​

  • Hosted as sub-pages on this current page within this Wiki upon successful approval of the standard.
  • Every standard should have sign-off (Bandwidth, Skills to support, supporting toolsets, Related Documentation etc.) from the SRE (Operational) pod first, to confirm feasibility of supporting and deploying the standard within the existing Empower ecosystem, unless it can be shown to have minimal impact on SRE operations.
  • A standard that affects the operations of a particular pod cannot be implemented if the pod's Team Lead or Subject Matter Expert does not agree with the standard.
  • If a "Product 2 Pager" requires a "solution" to be embedded, it should follow the above process as well.
  • Standards should roughly align towards OKR objectives or have explicit sign-off from Engineering Management.
  • Ideally: additional ADR standards (major implementation/feature changes of Empower) should not have more than 2-3 Standards that aren't considered "fully implemented."
  • Overall Standards Decision Process:
    • As announced at pod stand-ups: A request for Comment (RFC) on the standard and gather feedback, across all pods and larger engineering team.
    • (Approval TBD)