Don’t wait for us to tell you - here is TechMiners' toolbox

Tech teams do not need to wait for TechMiners' expert insights during a tech due diligence to discover valuable tips for improving their tech capabilities, managing their technical debt, or reducing their vulnerabilities.

Many leading platforms in the tech ecosystem have introduced a suite of essential tools that offer tremendous value by helping to significantly enhance operational success, providing organisations with the means to unlock their full potential early on.

Here is a rundown of some accessible and easy-to-use tools or essential processes we like to see during our tech assessments, and the roles they play.

👉 Automation of quality assurance and delivery

Using tools to automatically test and deploy software

Benefits

1. Saves time by automating repetitive tasks
2. Reduces human error in testing and deployment
3. Reduces Technical Debt at Scale

Tools

1. GitHub Actions
2. TeamCity
3. Jenkins
4. GitLab CI/CD

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👉 Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Managing infrastructure using code

Benefits

1. Automated documentation, saving time from writing and understanding through standards, allowing for scale
2. Versioning of infrastructure changes, allowing easy advancement and rollback if required

Tools

1. OpenTofu
2. AWS CDK
3. Terraform

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👉 Monitoring and alerting

Tools to track and notify about system performance

Benefits

1. Degradation can be detected before reaching a critical point, preventing outages before your users notice
2. Provides real-time insights into system health

Tools

1. CloudWatch
2. Prometheus
3. Grafana

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👉 Code quality & style consistency

Tools to maintain code standards

Benefits

1. Easier to read code, due to consistent styles, enabling scale, fixes and quality control
2. Cleaner history on version control, as "styling" commits are no longer required
3. These pre-commit solutions can be extended by a range of other supporting tools

Tools

1. Pre-commit
2. Husky

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👉 Automated dependency and vulnerability management

Tools to manage software dependencies and security, or code "freshness"

Benefits

1. Constant monitoring and updating in small increments reduces the risk of high-effort/cost adjustments, when many third party packages produce incompatibilities after being neglected, reducing technical debt
2. Tools to support licence monitoring and allow teams to flag potentially dangerous copyleft scenarios, such as AGPL reducing technical debt, commercial exposure, and/or legal issues

Tools

1. Trivy
2. Dependabot
3. Snyk
4. Renovate

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All these tools are minimally invasive and can offer great value and upside to any start-up without demanding significant attention.

Likewise the implementation of simple processes can also pay dividends in the long run, here are some best practices we like to see in our tech assessments.

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👉 Quality assurance and knowledge distribution

Benefits

1. Enforced code review processes and pull requests help to distribute knowledge across development teams and improve quality
2. Can increase DevX for junior engineers, who can benefit from improving their skills

Tools

1. Code Reviews via GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab
2. Documentation systems like Confluence, Notion or README files
3. Test automation via Selenium,  Cypress or TestLink

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👉 Ticketing and requirements engineering

Benefits

1. Proper requirements engineering, prevents an overwhelming majority of “bug tickets,” which arise when there lie discrepancies between technical requirements and functionality - the old principle “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) can be avoided 
2. Ensures implementation aligns with requests, and broader road maps. 
3. Allows the focus to be on the business outcome of a task, alongside acceptance criteria and definition of done to measure the Who, What and Why of the task

Tools

1. Jira
2. Shortcut
3. Trello
4. Asana

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👉 Data insights everywhere

Benefits

1. Better understanding of users, permits more accurate product management. Allowing prioritisation of targeted initiatives, and ditching of obsolete initiatives
2. Product metrics & KPIs when implemented early give continued analytics alongside a company's scaling.

Tools

1. Microsoft PowerBi
2. Apache Superset
3. Metabase
4. Tableau

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