Why are engineering values important?

Everything else will grow from values and behaviour

Wikipedia writes „… Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of action or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person’s sense of right and wrong or what „ought“ to be… Values tend to influence attitudes and behavior [value].“

And culture comes from these shared values that causes everyone to work with purpose.
A healthy culture makes developers more productive and happy by removing unnecessary overhead. A great culture brings teams together or helps the programmer to innovate and raises awareness about how to create better code.

So how do we get there? Here comes a list of actions and principles:

Design & Code
hold engineering design session
present proposals for new features
not writing bad code
say „no“ if a change is bad for the software
always looking for a better solution
build code, get feedback, improve or dump it
if it’s broken – fix it
do less better
ship small pieces of valuable code and a short period of time and learn

Shipping a feature
define success metrics
build a feature and get feedback from code review
use feature flags
deploy the simplest version possible – staff only
fix Bugs, make improvments before launching it to beta customers
Beta: Fix Bugs, make more improvments before launching a feature for everyone

Customer and products
focus on the customer
everybody’s goal is to make the customer’s job easier and more effective
work on projects you love
anyone has the right to freely express the ideas regarding future development of products
we are proud of our products and quality of work

These are just a few examples that could lead to a more healthier culture. A great culture emphasizes transparency and honesty, respects autonomy and encourages collaboration.