A culture of high performance

If you want to achieve high performance, then it's important to foster a company culture that encourages this and recognizes performance as vital. Culture can't just come from the bottom up only involving engineers, it also needs to come from the top-down and management must buy in to the performance prerogative.

Note

This section is not very technical, so feel free to skip it if you don't care about management or the human side of software development.

A blameless culture

The most important attributes of a high-performance culture are that it should be open and blameless. Everyone needs to be focused on achieving the best possible outcomes through measuring and learning. Attributing fault to individuals is toxic to delivering great software, and this is not only the case when it comes to performance.

If something goes wrong, then it is a process problem and the focus should be on improving it and preventing repeat mistakes in the future, for example, by automating...