CTO manifesto for digital healthcare

Motivation

Every digital business is driven by

1. customers with an evergrowing demand for fast, reliable, and intuitive software. These are the people that directly benefit from the provided value.
2. market regulations define the legal and economic frame within the company operates. Some companies might adhere to tighter laws than others.
3. stakeholders with a specific interest in the company's success. These people benefit from things like revenue, patents, or reputation.

This manifesto defines the fundamental rules of collaboration within an autonomously-working Engineering department to deliver

1. a high-standard service for our customers
2. within a defined regulatory framework
3. by satisfying the interests of our stakeholders.

Mission Statement

"The Software Engineering department supports the company's success by providing secure and high-quality service for our customers and stakeholders with state-of-the-art technology on a performant and highly available infrastructure."

What we strive to accomplish

We strive to deliver scalable and resilient software that supports users in their medical journey by delivering digital access to information, medication, treatment and medical documents.

We want to enable patients everywhere in the world to access services and information required for their medical treatment, and by that lay the foundation for a modern and efficient digital healthcare

Principles

We aim for a working environment according to the Agile Manifesto by

• …working on small stories that iteratively bring value to the product
• …having no separation of responsibilities (e.g. backend/frontend) between the stories.
• …constantly improving our way of working
• …treating each other with respect.

We trust our releases by

• …aiming for an automated release process
• …removing personal dependencies
• …having an immediate feedback on success/failure.

We embrace the advantages of container technology by

• …making sure our releases are deployable as containers in any environment
• …following the infrastructure-as-code paradigm
• …introducing parity between all environments

We stand for high-quality features by

• …doing code reviews
• …shipping every story with automated tests
• …pairing for the implementation if possible
• …not releasing untested code

We don't own & maintain hardware infrastructure ourselves

• …but rather rely on the expertise of IaaS providers for infrastructure services world-wide.
• …and build a service only when it is not provided by a third-party vendor.
• …and we are aware of the performance of our platform at any time.

We enforce a loosely coupled architecture by

• …deploying functionalities in services
• …extending it easily with additional services
• …following the needs of the business

We care for the security of our software by

• …encrypting data at rest and transmission
• …not storing passwords in clear text
• …working with anonymized data only
• …removing technical debt

We continuously measure metrics throughout the platform because

• …we want to react immediately on abnormal behavior.
• …only what gets measured can be improved,
• …our software services are a core element of the company’s success.