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Technical Excellence

Once a solution has been built and deployed, it needs regular maintenance to avoid becoming legacy and a technical burden to support.

Scaling

How will your system scale? Has it been designed and written to run in a multi-threaded and multi-server environment?

In the frequent usage of cloud hosting, your application must be able to operate in a stateless manner split across availability zones to provide seamless experience to the end user should a zone fail.

System performance monitoring and optimization

Deploy monitoring tools to check performance and resource utilisation of a system. This also aligns to being financially aware and optimising resources - particularly in cloud environments.

Alerting should be configured to provide infrastructure alerts to engineering teams. Regularly review which metrics are important and establish a normal base line value for each.

Uptime monitoring is critical if your service is contracted via an uptime SLA guarantee.

Technical Debt Management

Review lifecycle of 3rd party dependencies (.NET framework etc.) and ensure you are always running on a supported, current version.

Regularly (quarterly at minimum) update the 3rd party dependencies your code relies on, even if there are no other coding changes required at that time. Test the change and deploy it - this aligns with a security first approach.

Technical Reviews & Architecture

Keep abreast of changes in technology which could benefit your solution, either reducing cost or improving performance are good drivers to adopt a new technology.

Avoid “jumping on the bandwagon” of new technical trends, instead evaluate how they could benefit (or not).

If there isn’t a compelling reason to change, then don’t - however don’t get left behind and ensure your 3rd party dependencies are always in support and regularly patched.