Set standards early to speed delivery and raise code quality

Founder TL;DR

- Agree small engineering guardrails in week one.

- Fewer surprises near release via consistent checks.

- Avoid ~£18k rework per quarter for a six-person team.

- Supports SOC 2 change control with automated, auditable gates.

- Next step: book a 45-minute standards sprint.

Why early standards feel slow

The 7 guardrails

Standards set in week one look slow because you see the cost up front. The payoff arrives when change is expensive, near release and in production. Standardise what the computer can enforce, and free people to decide intent and risk.

Start with a single definition of done, one CI pipeline, and a small review checklist.

Branching & PR rules

IaC naming & tags

Policy-as-code baseline

Secrets & identities (Key Vault, PIM)

Environment gates (same artefact)

Observability defaults

Incidseven guardrails

1. Infrastructure-as-code naming and tagging: Agree naming conventions for resources and tagging policies so that your infrastructure is discoverable and auditable. Tools such as Bicep and Terraform support modules and tags to enforce consistency.

2. Policy as code baseline: Define a baseline set of Azure policies in code. Use Azure Policy, built‑in initiatives and your own definitions to enforce secure defaults such as allowed regions, SKU restrictions and encryption at rest.

3. Secrets and identities: Centralise secrets, keys and certificates in Azure Key Vault, use identity and access management such as Azure Active Directory and Privileged Identity Management to limit exposure, and enforce managed identities for services.

4. Environment gates: Implement separate environments (development, staging, production) with the same build artefact and configuration as code. Use pipelines with protected approvals so that changes are validated automatically and human approvals are recorded.

5. Observability defaults: Configure metrics, logging and tracing from day one. Use Application Insights and Log Analytics to capture useful telemetry, and standardise alert names and severities to make triage easier.

6. Incident communication channel: Create a shared incident channel in Teams or Slack where the engineering team can triage issues and share context. Make incident hand‑off processes part of your standards.

7. Regular standards sprints: Hold a short standards sprint every quarter to review what is working, remove redundant checks and align with evolving compliance frameworks. This keeps your guardrails lightweight and relevant.

Quantifying the cost of skipping standards

Skipping standards feels like saving time, but the cost compounds quickly. Assume a team of six engineers with a day rate of £600 who lose five weeks per quarter because of unexpected rework, manual release triage and security fixes. Five weeks × six engineers equates to 30 engineer days; at £600 per day the direct cost is £18,000 per quarter or £72,000 per year. This does not include the opportunity cost of missed features, nor the stress of cutting corners on compliance just to hit a date. By contrast, a short standards sprint and a handful of policy definitions can automate most of these checks.

Next steps

- Book a 45-minute standards sprint: Set aside time with your team to agree your "Definition of Done", build pipeline configuration and policy baseline.

- Automate what you can: Use tools such as Azure Policy, Bicep, Terraform and GitHub Actions to enforce rules and trigger tests automatically.

- Review and iterate: As your product and team grow, revisit the guardrails to remove unused rules and to capture new risks.

Related reading:

- Azure Policy Attestation → https://bagh.co.uk/post/azure-policy-attestation

- All vs Index in Azure Policy → https://bagh.co.uk/post/azure-policy-all-vs-index