Engineering Foundations

---
name: engineering-foundations
description: Build and reinforce core engineering execution habits with repeatable practices for architecture decisions, testing strategy, and code review discipline. Use when planning capability growth, improving delivery quality, or creating weekly technical drills.
---

# Engineering Foundations

## Purpose

Strengthen core engineering practice so delivery quality and decision quality improve consistently over time.

## When to Use

- Building a weekly improvement plan for engineering fundamentals.
- Designing repeatable drills for architecture, testing, or code review.
- Turning vague growth goals into measurable technical habits.

## Inputs

- Current role and project context.
- Known strengths and gaps.
- Available weekly practice time.
- Optional: recent PRs, postmortems, or design notes.

## Outputs

- A focused weekly drill plan.
- Clear success criteria for each drill.
- A short evidence log template for tracking progress.

## Steps

1. Identify one primary focus area: architecture, testing, or review quality.
2. Define one measurable weekly drill tied to that focus area.
3. Set a minimum evidence requirement (artifact, note, benchmark, or review summary).
4. Run the drill once per week and record observations.
5. Adjust scope based on friction and outcomes every 2-4 weeks.

## Examples

- Architecture drill: Produce one design note each week with explicit tradeoffs and one rejected option.
- Testing drill: Add one integration test for a high-risk flow and document failure modes it catches.
- Review drill: Run one structured code review with a checklist focused on correctness, readability, and risk.

## Non-goals / Guardrails

- Do not treat this as performance evaluation or HR scoring.
- Do not include work confidential information, internal code, or proprietary architecture details.
- Do not over-engineer metrics; optimize for consistency first.