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Standard : Teams have autonomy to shape their development environments

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures teams have the autonomy to shape their development environments to suit their needs, improving productivity, satisfaction, and flow. It enables faster onboarding, clearer focus, and better outcomes.

Aligned to our "Developer Experience Matters" policy, this standard reduces friction and empowers teams to optimise how they build. Without it, engineers struggle with rigid tooling, slower delivery, and diminished morale.

Strategic Impact

  • Improved consistency and quality across teams
  • Reduced operational friction and delivery risks
  • Stronger ownership and autonomy in technical decision-making
  • More inclusive and sustainable engineering culture

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Slower time-to-value and increased rework
  • Accumulation of inconsistency and process debt
  • Reduced trust in engineering data, systems, or ownership
  • Loss of agility in the face of change or failure

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Development environments are rigid or inconsistent. Engineers rely on default setups or workaround solutions, with little support for customisation.

  • Level 2 – Managed: Some teams begin to adapt their environments, but changes are manual, untracked, and may lead to divergence or compatibility issues.

  • Level 3 – Defined: Teams have clear guidelines and tooling support to customise their development environments within safe parameters. Experience is documented and shared.

  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Development environment configurations are tracked, versioned, and measured for onboarding time, productivity, and support load. Improvements are driven by data.

  • Level 5 – Optimising: Teams continuously refine their environments based on feedback, metrics, and evolving needs. DevEx is a strategic priority, and platform teams support self-service, secure customisation at scale.


Key Measures

  • Adoption rates and coverage across teams
  • Impact on delivery metrics, quality, or team health
  • Evidence of ownership, governance, or learning loops
Associated Policies
  • Developer Experience Matters
  • Empower Teams to Self-Serve
Associated Practices
  • Developer Environment Automation
  • Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
  • Onboarding Playbooks
  • Psychological Safety Practices
Associated Measures
  • Onboarding Time
  • Time to First PR

Technical debt is like junk food - easy now, painful later.

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