Software standards: How to build and maintain effective service maturity

Establishing consistent software standards across your engineering organization is essential for maintaining quality, security, and operational efficiency. How do you implement standards that teams will actually follow without creating an overwhelming burden on your developers?

Two of our in-house experts talked these issues out in a webinar. We adapted this blog post from their conversation (which you can watch in full below). 

What are software standards and why do they matter

Software standards (also called service maturity, production readiness, or software maturity) ensure a consistent level of quality across engineering organizations by establishing minimum requirements that teams need to meet to ship code securely and comfortably.

Beyond the outcomes of "improved product quality," "increased performance," and "reduced delivery time," effective standards programs deliver concrete benefits like:

• Improved incident response time and effectiveness
• Greater developer autonomy through clear guidelines
• A structured approach to manage complex cross-cutting initiatives

At its core, software standards encompass any work that's defined outside of a service-owning team and doesn't directly involve building customer-facing features.

Prerequisites for a successful software standards program

Executive buy-in

Before implementing any software standards programs, securing executive buy-in is essential. Teams need a compelling reason to dedicate their limited time to initiatives outside of their daily responsibilities. When leadership clearly communicates that these standards are critical to business success, teams are more likely to prioritize this work.

For example, having a CTO or VP of Engineering regularly check in on standards compliance metrics and highlight their importance in all-hands meetings sends a strong signal about organizational priorities.

Defined service ownership

You can't enforce standards without clear ownership. An up-to-date service catalog that outlines who's responsible for what prevents work from falling through the cracks.

Service ownership should answer questions such as:

• Who is the primary contact for issues with this service?
• Which team is responsible for maintaining this service's documentation?
• Who should be alerted if this service experiences outages?

Without clear ownership, software standards implementation becomes a game of hot potato, with teams avoiding responsibility for critical operational work.

Core elements of an effective software standards program

Rather than viewing standards implementation as a linear process, successful organizations treat it as a continuous cycle with three distinct phases:

Build a process

Teams driving standards work (often platform teams, SRE teams, or developer experience teams) need a structured process for communicating and tracking initiatives with service-owning teams. Ad-hoc approaches that rely on blasting messages across Slack channels typically fail.

Instead, create:

• A centralized place to document standards requirements
• Clear criteria for when standards apply to different services
• A predictable cadence for introducing new standards

Establish a routine

For service-owning teams, software standards work must become part of the regular development routine rather than "side-of-desk" work that gets addressed only when convenient. 

Successful approaches include:

• Dedicating 20% of sprint time specifically to operational work
• Including standards compliance as part of sprint planning
• Making standards part of code review criteria

One particularly effective method some organizations employ is gating deployments based on maturity levels: services must achieve specific standards (bronze, silver, gold) before they can be deployed. While this requires significant organizational maturity and change management, it creates a strong incentive for teams to prioritize standards work.

Implement reporting

Reporting provides visibility into standards compliance for engineering leadership. Effective reporting should:

• Show progress metrics for specific initiatives
• Highlight teams that need additional support
• Demonstrate the business impact of standards compliance

Best practices for a viable software standards program

When implementing a system to track standards compliance, these best practices are essential.

Alignment

Standards should align with executive priorities and organizational goals. If leadership isn't reinforcing the importance of standards work, teams will naturally prioritize feature development.

Consolidation

All requirements for service owners should be consolidated in one place. When standards are scattered across wikis, documents, and team knowledge bases, compliance becomes nearly impossible.

3. Prioritization

Service owners need clear guidance on what needs to be done first and why. Not all standards are equally important; some address critical security vulnerabilities while others may be more aspirational quality improvements.

Implementing standards through checks and campaigns

Defining maturity through checks

The most effective standards programs use specific, measurable checks to determine a service's maturity level. These checks can be based on:

• Service information (e.g., "Does this service have designated owners?")
• Code and configurations (e.g., "Does this service have a code owners file?")
• Infrastructure metadata (e.g., "Are there critical vulnerabilities in this service's artifacts?")

Automating these checks whenever possible reduces the burden on teams. Rather than manually verifying compliance, systems can scan repositories, check deployment configurations, or integrate with security scanning tools to provide real-time compliance data.

Using campaigns for implementation

The most common objection to standards programs is simple: developers don't have enough time. This is where campaigns come in.

A campaign is a focused, time-bound initiative to implement specific standards across multiple services. Instead of overwhelming teams with eight new standards to implement immediately, campaigns allow organizations to:

• Group related standards together (e.g., all Ruby version upgrade requirements)
• Set clear start and end dates
• Track progress across affected services
• Provide reminders and resources to help teams succeed

Once a campaign concludes, those standards can be incorporated into the ongoing maturity requirements for all services.

Preventing service decay

One often overlooked benefit of standards programs is identifying "forgotten" services: those that haven't been updated in months or years, yet still run in production.

Effective approaches to surface these potentially risky services include:

• Checks that flag services without recent deployments
• Integration with dependency update tools to identify outdated packages
• Continuous scanning of repositories to identify unmaintained code

By bringing these services back into compliance with current standards, organizations reduce their risk surface area and prevent technical debt from accumulating in forgotten corners of their infrastructure.

Elevate software standards with OpsLevel 

Implementing software standards doesn't need to be daunting. By ensuring executive buy-in, defining clear service ownership, and establishing effective tracking and reporting systems, your organization can consistently deliver higher-quality software with improved security and reliability.

OpsLevel makes this process seamless by providing a comprehensive platform to define, track, and enforce your software standards. With OpsLevel, you can:

• Automate compliance checks 
• Streamline campaigns
• Gain real-time visibility into the maturity of your services

Ready to see how OpsLevel can elevate your organization's software standards program? Book a call with our team today.

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