You can’t improve what you can’t define or measure

In today’s competitive technology landscape, maintaining high standards in engineering is essential to building reliable, high-quality products. Engineering standards are the backbone of excellence, ensuring that teams follow consistent, high-quality practices throughout the software development lifecycle. Without clear standards, engineering teams face inconsistencies that can lead to unreliable software, increased technical debt, and misaligned project goals, which can significantly impact a company’s reputation and bottom line.

Enforcing standards a challenge

For enterprises, enforcing standards across distributed teams and complex projects is challenging, and without a structured way to assess adherence, inconsistencies and inefficiencies arise. Smaller companies, by contrast, may struggle to establish these standards from the outset, which can hinder their ability to scale efficiently. Scorecard addresses these critical needs by providing a platform designed to assess, enforce, and improve engineering standards across diverse teams and projects, laying the foundation for engineering excellence.

Scorecards as the foundation for engineering excellence

New Relic Scorecards is a strategic solution that offers predefined scorecards focused on core areas of engineering best practices. Rather than acting as just another process monitoring tool, Scorecards provides a structured framework to guide organizations in consistently applying and tracking high standards. These predefined scorecards are invaluable for organizations at all stages:

• Production Readiness - Ensures systems meet operational requirements for stability and reliability before they go live.
• Ownership and Documentation - Provides clear ownership and robust documentation practices, reducing knowledge silos and operational risks.
• DORA Metrics - Metrics developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team, offers a measurable view of software delivery performance, enabling teams to improve deployment frequency, recovery time, and failure rates.
• Operational Readiness - Confirms that systems are equipped for real-world performance, reducing downtime and optimizing operational stability.
• Security - Aligns engineering practices with essential security standards, mitigating risks of vulnerabilities and protecting user data.
• Web Vitals - Tracks metrics critical to frontend performance, such as load times and interactivity, ensuring an optimal user experience.
• AWS Reliability - Assess your reliability against AWS prescribed standards. Making sure you are following the best practices.
• Tagging Compliance - Helps you to define a tagging strategy for your services and checks that your services are compliant with your strategy.
• APM Best Practices - Provides best practices to use application performance monitoring software well.

These predefined scorecards form a baseline of best practices that organizations can adopt immediately. For larger enterprises, they provide the consistency needed to drive quality across departments. For SMEs, (subject matter experts) they serve as a foundational framework, supporting high standards from the ground up.

Customizable scorecards create personalized reports

While Scorecards offers critical predefined templates, the platform also allows teams to create custom scorecards tailored to unique standards and goals. By customizing metrics and rules, organizations can align Scorecards’ assessments with their specific requirements. This flexibility enables teams to adopt high-level company standards while adapting to local, team-specific goals, ensuring that standards meet the needs of each team and department without sacrificing overall consistency.

Automated reporting and long-term tracking to drive continuous improvement

Scorecards’ automated reporting and 12 months of data retention provide insights that go beyond a single snapshot, enabling teams to track their progress in maintaining and improving standards over time. This historical data allows organizations to identify trends, gauge improvements, and pinpoint areas requiring additional focus, reinforcing a culture of continuous improvement. With long-term visibility, teams can make data-driven decisions, set realistic improvement goals, and ensure engineering standards evolve alongside business needs.

GitHub Integration

The New Relic Service Architecture Intelligence integration with GitHub allows you to import essential data on teams, team members, repos, owners and pull request (PR) metadata from your GitHub account into New Relic. This enhances the management and visibility of Teams, Catalogs and Scorecards in New Relic by simplifying role management, entity ownership mapping, and streamlining the onboarding and configuration process for users who rely on GitHub.

Available as part of Advanced Compute Usage

New Relic Scorecards can be accessed as part of New Relic’s Advanced Compute innovations. This means you are measured and billed based on usage which optimizes your spend and eliminates the need for static license fees

Conclusion

Scorecards positions itself not just as a compliance tool but as a foundational asset that empowers organizations to build and sustain a culture of engineering excellence. For large enterprises, Scorecards is a must-have framework that aligns distributed teams, supports accountability, and ensures consistent adherence to best practices. For SMEs, it’s an investment in the future, providing the structure necessary to establish and grow with industry-leading standards that foster high-quality software development.