---
title: "ISE Engineering Fundamentals Playbook"
source: Microsoft Code-With Engineering Playbook
source_url: https://github.com/microsoft/code-with-engineering-playbook
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: microsoft-code-with-playbook
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

# ISE Engineering Fundamentals Playbook

An engineer working for a [ISE](ISE.md) project...

* Has responsibilities to their team – mentor, coach, and lead.
* Knows their **playbook**. Follows their playbook. Fixes their playbook if it is broken. If they find a better playbook, they copy it. If somebody could use their playbook, they share it.
* Leads by example. Models the behaviors we desire both interpersonally and technically.
* Strives to understand how their work fits into a broader context and ensures the outcome.

This is our playbook. All contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request to get involved.

## Why Have a Playbook

* To increase overall efficiency for team members and the whole team in general.
* To reduce the number of mistakes and avoid common pitfalls.
* To strive to be better engineers and learn from other people's shared experience.

If you do nothing else follow the [Engineering Fundamentals Checklist](./engineering-fundamentals-checklist.md)!

The [first week of an ISE project](./the-first-week-of-an-ise-project.md) is a breakdown of the sections of the playbook according to the structure of an Agile sprint.

## General Guidance

* Keep the code quality bar high.
* Value quality and precision over ‘getting things done’.
* Work diligently on the one important thing.
* As a distributed team take time to share context via wiki, teams and backlog items.
* Make the simple thing work now. Build fewer features today, but ensure they work amazingly. Then add more features tomorrow.
* Avoid adding scope to a backlog item, instead add a new backlog item.
* Our goal is to ship incremental customer value.
* Keep backlog item details up to date to communicate the state of things with the rest of your team.
* Report product issues found and provide clear and repeatable engineering feedback!
* We all own our code and each one of us has an obligation to make all parts of the solution great.

## Contributing

See [CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/microsoft/code-with-engineering-playbook/tree/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) for contribution guidelines.
