Guides Overview

The guides are the engineering handbook inside the handbook: opinionated, concrete references for how to run a real software project. They are not assignments; they are how you get good at the things the assignments assess. Reach for them when your team hits the corresponding problem, or better, one sprint before.

Working Together

• Working Agreement: roles, decision-making, conflict handling, AI tool norms. Feeds the Team Charter.
• Sprint: the two-week cadence, planning, and what “done” means. Feeds Sprint Notes and Demos.
• Planning and Prioritization: ideation techniques, prioritization methods, and success-metric frameworks. Feeds the Definition of Shipped metrics.
• Retrospectives: formats and facilitation for term retrospectives and beyond.
• Conflict and Performance Conversations: conflict-handling modes, raising a contribution problem, and when to escalate.

Building

• Git and GitHub: branching, reviews, and repository discipline, including the PR-per-sprint ownership norm.
• Requirements: writing testable requirements for your repo’s living docs/requirements.md.
• Technical Design: the system view in docs/design.md, and why design docs matter more, not less, in the AI era.
• ADR: recording decisions; the second life of your RFC.
• Generative AI: tools, project-level context, verification habits, and team coordination.

Verifying and Shipping

• Testing Strategy: the pyramid, contracts, and what to test when time is short.
• Security: STRIDE, secrets, dependencies, and managed auth.
• DevOps: CI/CD, environments, deployment platforms, and rollbacks.
• Shipping: the category-by-category path from prototype to the top of the outcome ladder. Feeds the Definition of Shipped.
• Documentation: the living docs your repo must carry and how to keep them honest.

Communicating

• Presentations: sprint demos, stakeholder presentations, design reviews, and public demonstrations such as the Expo.