Vitamin E for Engineering Teams: Caring for Engineering Excellence

Engineering excellence isn't a one-off project; it's a daily nutrient that keeps a team's codebase healthy. The article likens it to Vitamin E, an antioxidant that continuously protects cells, arguing that leaders must feed quality work every sprint to avoid the slow-down of technical debt.

Technical debt and quality issues act like oxidative stress, degrading speed and morale. By treating these issues as measurable symptoms, leaders can use frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, or DevEx to get actionable signals about performance, scalability, reliability, code quality and other health dimensions.

The piece outlines three practical steps: measure system and process health, prioritize engineering excellence alongside product goals, and embed that mindset in team culture. It suggests picking a lightweight set of metrics - p90 latency, deployment frequency, MTTR, test coverage, error rates - and reviewing them regularly to spot where "oxidative stress" is creeping in.

To keep the habit sustainable, three allocation models are recommended: dedicated tech-debt weeks, a 10-20% capacity buffer each sprint, or a unified approach that bakes quality checks into feature planning. Leaders reinforce the culture by publicly recognizing refactors, observability improvements, and by framing excellence as an accelerator of delivery rather than a blocker.