Practices Overview
This section holds practices content — the human, process, and tooling patterns that surround the technical work covered elsewhere in the library. That includes how engineers plan software before coding, how platform teams plan delivery next to on-call, and how they communicate in incidents. Pages are written for senior engineers on infrastructure, platform, and SRE teams; titles and ladder levels vary by org but the practices generalize.
The library does not replace your organization’s training, ladder rubrics, or vendor-specific playbooks. It connects practice patterns to the rest of this site’s content (CI/CD, observability, Kubernetes, QA, AIOps, system design).
How These Topics Fit
Section titled “How These Topics Fit”- Leadership and Mentoring — judgment and facilitation that cut across everything below.
- Technical Design Document — plan a change before you build (problem, scope, stack, risks).
- Agile for SRE and Platform Work — ship that work under interrupts and toil.
- Incident Tooling and Customer Communications — when production breaks, page, escalate, and communicate.
Topics in This Section
Section titled “Topics in This Section”- Leadership and Mentoring — Mentoring structures, coaching debugging methodology, feedback patterns, calibrating technical judgment, roadmap influence, and resolving cross-team prioritization conflicts.
- Technical Design Document — Industry names for planning docs (PRD, design doc, tech spec, RFC, ADR) and a reusable fill-in template for planning software before coding.
- Agile for SRE and Platform Work — Scrum and Kanban applied to interrupt-driven platform work, sprint commitments alongside on-call, toil budgets, ceremonies that help vs ceremony theater, and Definition of Done for infrastructure changes.
- Incident Tooling and Customer Communications — On-call schedules, escalation policies, status pages (internal vs external), severity-driven customer comms templates, and stakeholder updates during long incidents. Pattern-first; vendor-second.
Related Sections
Section titled “Related Sections”| Topic | Where to Go |
|---|---|
| Reliability and quality | QA, QA reliability guide |
| Incident command and postmortems | Incident response and on-call |
| Pipeline guardrails for platform teams | CI/CD best practices |
| Service readiness before production | Service readiness checklist |
| Large system design review | Design review checklist |
| System design foundations | System design |