If there’s one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it’s that there’s a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren’t prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have. Of course, you should feel free to replace “engineers” with “Product Managers” or “executives” if that feels more comfortable. It’s a compelling narrative with a clear villain, and it conveniently shifts blame away from engineering leadership. Still, like most narratives that move accountability towards the folks with the least power, it’s both unhelpful and wrong.

Denis Bolkovskis

Anthropic

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Managing technical quality in a codebase requires engineers to prioritize quality, adopt best practices, and align technical vectors. It is important to address hot spots causing immediate problems, adopt practices known to improve quality, and identify leverage points that preserve quality over time. Measurement of codebase quality is crucial, and organizations can establish technical quality teams or quality programs to maintain and improve technical quality.

Managing technical quality in a codebase.