High-level blueprint
Here’s a high-level blueprint encompassing reliability work in software engineering.
We break this blueprint down into greater detail through workstreams 👇🏼
Dive deeper through workstreams
Visualizing your reliability work as a blueprint helps create a strong, supportive mental model for effective action.
The above high-level blueprint is great for managerial overviews, but engineers and teams doing the work require a deeper look. This is where thinking in workstreams becomes useful.
What are workstreams?
You might have heard of “value streams”. They show the end-to-end journey of creating and delivering value to a customer.
Workstreams support your value streams. Value streams are the goals and workstreams are the activities you do to achieve those goals.
For this blueprint, workstreams are the individual swim lanes e.g. observability and incident management.
How to use workstreams
- We know of Reliability Engineers (xREs) contributing to some or all of these workstreams in a meaningful way
- Prioritize workstreams that are relevant to your current business needs
- Aim to focus on one workstream at a time, especially if you are experiencing high cognitive load
- We recommend you start with good observability and release engineering practices
A quick history of this work
Ash developed a capability model for operationalizing new value streams early(ish) in his management career in 2011.
He kept it internal until 2021 when he made an early SRE capability map (external link) to think deeply about software reliability. Now, you can enjoy an enhanced workstream version here to support your reliability work.
What you should do next
⭐ Bookmark this page to stay updated with the blueprint
↳ Our goal is to grow every workstream to good levels of detail
💬 Share this blueprint with your (technical) friends and colleagues
What’s in it for you to do this? Wider access to this blueprint promotes effective mental models for reliability. This can enhance standards across organizations and eliminate the need for yak shaving in your next job.
Observability workstream
We’ll publish more workstreams once the observability workstream is complete.
At the moment, we still have to populate it with tasks, risk advice, and other data.