Management and support
How the field of a Engineering Manager got here: the sourced milestones from every published course of this career, on one axis.
1917 to 2026
114 milestones across 12 courses
The axis stretches toward recent years, where most milestones fall. Bars count milestones per year; dots are single milestones.
18 milestones
1917
The United States Army introduced group-administered mental tests to screen roughly 1.75 million First World War recruits. Large-scale standardized selection dates from this program, and so does the criticism that followed it.
1950
The Act required Federal agencies to establish appraisal systems and used three summary levels. It made formal appraisal a defined personnel process rather than an informal supervisor practice.
1958
The Act provided training to improve performance and prepare employees for advancement. It made development an explicit companion to appraisal in the Federal system.
1962
The Act required an acceptable-level-of-competence determination for within-grade increases and allowed additional increases for high-quality performance. It linked appraisal outcomes to pay decisions.
1964 Jul 2
Title VII prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin and created the EEOC. Recruitment and hiring became explicit parts of federal equal employment enforcement.
1964 Jul 2
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Every later selection procedure in United States practice operates under this constraint, including the requirement that assessments be job-related.
1967
The ADEA prohibited covered employment discrimination against older workers. Hiring criteria and selection procedures therefore had to account for age discrimination as well as Title VII protections.
1971 Mar 8
The Supreme Court held that facially neutral practices such as tests and diploma requirements are unlawful under Title VII when they freeze the status of a protected group, unless the employer shows the practice is job-related. Job-relatedness became the burden of the employer, not a courtesy.
1972
Congress gave the EEOC authority to sue private employers and extended Title VII across the federal government and qualifying state and local agencies. Enforcement became a stronger operational constraint on recruiting and selection.
1973
Section 501 prohibited federal-government discrimination against qualified people with disabilities. Disability access and job qualification became linked concerns in covered hiring.
1976
Michael Fagan's paper describes a structured inspection method with defined roles, exit criteria, and measurement — finding 50–65% of operational defects before testing, later reaching 75–85% in exceptional cases.
1978
Agencies had to develop appraisal systems based on job-related performance standards and encourage employee participation in setting those standards. Appraisal results became inputs to training, rewards, promotion, retention, and removal decisions.
1978
Congress clarified that discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions is sex discrimination. Hiring practices could not treat pregnancy as a disqualifying proxy.
1978 Aug 25
Federal agencies adopted common guidance for evaluating adverse impact and validating employee selection procedures. Employers gained a formal framework for connecting tests and screens to jobs.
1978 Aug 25
The EEOC, Civil Service Commission, Department of Labor, and Department of Justice jointly adopted the Uniform Guidelines, codifying validation strategy, adverse-impact analysis, and the four-fifths rule of thumb. They remain the operative federal framework for evaluating selection procedures.
1984
The system introduced five summary rating levels and required joint participation in setting standards for covered supervisors and managers. The rules explicitly prohibited forced rating distributions.
1986
A follow-up paper in IEEE Software refines the process and reports that IBM inspections found 90% of all defects detected over a product's life cycle with a 9% reduction in average project cost.
1986 Jan
Takeuchi and Nonaka described a holistic, overlapping product development approach using a rugby metaphor. The article became one of the influences cited in Scrum's later history.
10 milestones
1990 Jul 26
The ADA extended employment protections for qualified people with disabilities in covered private, state, and local employment. Application access, inquiries, tests, and accommodation became core hiring-process concerns.
1991
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 added jury-trial rights and damages in specified intentional discrimination cases. Documented, job-related hiring decisions carried greater practical importance.
1993
Jeff Sutherland and colleagues developed Scrum at Easel Corporation. This established an empirical team framework before the Agile Manifesto supplied a broader name for related approaches.
1995
Revised regulations allowed agencies to develop programs for their own needs and cultures, with two to five summary levels. The change moved away from one uniform operating design.
1995
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland co-presented Scrum at OOPSLA, making an early formal definition public.
1995
Ken Schwaber presented Scrum publicly at the OOPSLA conference in Austin. The framework entered wider software-development discussion before the Agile Manifesto.
1996
PMI introduced the PMBOK Guide, giving project management a shared reference for practices and terminology.
1996
An SEI report describes a tool embodying the Software Architecture Analysis Method and preserving scenarios and design rationale while exploring alternatives.
1998
The meta-analysis "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology" tabled validity coefficients for common selection methods and ranked cognitive ability tests at .51 and structured interviews at .51. For two decades it anchored advice about which assessments carry predictive weight.
1998 Jul
The SEI publishes the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method for evaluating how candidate architectures satisfy interacting quality attributes and for identifying risks.
23 milestones
2000
The 2000 edition extended the 1996 guide with updated practices, tools, techniques, and clarifications.
2001
The Agile Manifesto stated principles for iterative software work, including regular reflection and adjustment. Scrum later became widely used within this broader agile context.
2001
Google develops Mondrian, a Perforce-based tool that enforces peer-review before submission to the central monorepo, establishing the lightweight, tool-integrated model the company still uses.
2001 Feb
The manifesto articulated values that favored collaboration, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change.
2001 Feb
Seventeen practitioners met at Snowbird and published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. It expressed common value preferences across several existing lightweight approaches.
2002
The Act required standards and metrics for assessing human-capital management and created the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. Performance systems became part of a broader accountability framework.
2004
Van Rossum releases Rietveld on Google App Engine as an open-source counterpart to Mondrian, bringing tool-based review to Subversion projects and proving the model works beyond Google's walls.
2004
PMI described the triple constraint as a framework for evaluating competing demands in project work.
2004 Oct
A pull system was designed for Microsoft's XIT Sustaining Engineering group, with Test treated as the bottleneck. It established an early software-service application before a physical board was involved.
2005
A construction-informatics study reports retrospective case studies of tracking decisions during architectural design, treating decision history as an explicit concern.
2005
After discussion with Donald Reinertsen, the XIT implementation was revisited as a kanban system. The change made the approach easier to explain and shifted attention to WIP limits.
2006
The completed XIT story was presented publicly as a virtual kanban system implementation. This made the approach visible beyond its original team.
2006 Sep
Corbis designed a system to replace a project-centric process for minor application upgrades. An expedite capability introduced an alternative class of service.
2007
Shawn Pearce forks Rietveld to create Gerrit, adding access control and server-side enforcement that makes code review mandatory for AOSP contributions — the first large-scale open-source change-based review.
2007
The six practices, capacity allocation, and classes of service emerged from the Corbis work. The method connected WIP limits and visualized risks to service decisions.
2007 Jan
A card wall was added at Corbis as flow variation became difficult to interpret. It supported further improvement and made workflow visualization a practical intervention.
2007 Jun
A conference presentation covered classes of service, lead-time histograms, operations review, and improvement events. These made flow evidence part of the method's public practice.
2008
GitHub ships with a simple pull request system that wraps `git request-pull` in a web UI, making lightweight code review accessible to every hosted repository.
2008
PMI released the fourth edition as part of a simultaneous update of four standards.
2008 Aug
Detailed implementation scenarios included applying Kanban to Scrum teams and projects. The presentation became a foundation for the approach later called Scrumban.
2008 Sep 25
The amendments broadened how disability is interpreted and took effect in 2009. Covered hiring processes had to apply the expanded definition when handling applicants and accommodation.
2009
Revised regulations required supervisor and manager training on mentoring, improving employee performance, conducting appraisals, and assisting employees with unacceptable performance.
2009 May
The first Lean Kanban conference was held in Miami after community discussion. It created a forum for sharing practice beyond individual organizations.
37 milestones
2010
The Scrum Guide's authors wrote its first version to provide a shared definition of Scrum for readers worldwide.
2010
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland published the first official Scrum Guide. A concise public reference made the framework's accountabilities, events, artifacts, and rules easier to distinguish from local custom.
2010
GitHub overhauls pull requests into permanent, revision-aware discussions with diff views and inline commenting — transforming them from merge notifications into a genuine code review surface.
2010 May
David J. Anderson's book Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business was published. It gave practitioners a dedicated reference for implementing kanban systems in knowledge-work settings.
2011
GitLab begins as an open-source alternative to GitHub, adding merge requests a month later and coupling review to an integrated CI/CD pipeline from the start.
2011
The GEAR model connected organizational alignment, accountability, engagement, and results. It recommended linking employee performance management to organizational performance management.
2011
The official revision history records changes between the 2011 and 2013 Guides, establishing a maintained public reference.
2011 Nov
Lean Kanban University was positioned as the home of a trade association for standardized Kanban training. Sixteen founding firms joined as charter members.
2011 Nov
Documenting Architecture Decisions presents short, modular decision records as a practical way to retain context in agile software projects.
2012
PMI announced the fifth edition in its 2012 annual report as the next update to its project-management guide.
2012 Feb
Founding members agreed a governing charter in Utrecht and launched the association publicly. The milestone marked a more formal global training community.
2012 May 22
Etsy publicly described blameless postmortems as a way for engineers to provide actions, observations, expectations, assumptions, and timelines without fear of punishment. The publication made contextual accounts a visible engineering practice.
2013
The 2013 revision added an Artifact Transparency section, reinforcing that inspection depends on a trustworthy view of work.
2014
DORA reports that it operationalized and validated Westrum's organizational-culture model in 2014. The model connected information flow, cooperation, trust, bridging, and inquiry to software-delivery research.
2014
Etsy's progress report recorded more than 100 postmortems in 2014, each using collective timeline reconstruction and remediation planning. It documented the practice as an organizational program rather than an isolated incident ritual.
2014
Google SRE records a 2014 internal presentation about high-impact incidents and postmortem practice. It shows postmortem discussion becoming part of a broader engineering learning culture.
2014
The annual State of DevOps research published a report in partnership with Puppet. It established a recurring empirical reference for software-delivery measurement.
2015
The DORA research history lists a 2015 report in the Puppet partnership series. Repeated reporting made delivery practices measurable across survey cohorts over time.
2015
AWS makes its workload guidance public, establishing a framework for comparing architecture choices against operational, security, reliability, performance, and cost concerns.
2015 Apr 7
Laszlo Bock's account of Google's People Operations described structured interviews, work-sample tests, and scorecard-based debriefs to a mass audience. Structured hiring shifted from industrial-organizational practice to mainstream engineering management advice.
2016
The DORA research history lists the 2016 report in the same series. The series continued collecting evidence about software delivery practices and outcomes.
2016
The project license identifies 2016 copyright for command-line tooling that creates and manages repository-based Architecture Decision Records.
2016
The Google SRE book made its postmortem-culture chapter publicly available with criteria, blameless language, review, and sharing practices. It gave teams a documented SRE reference for treating incident reviews as learning work.
2016
Performance Management Plus added employee engagement to the prior model and encouraged supervisors to engage employees early and frequently through the performance period.
2016
The 2016 revision added commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect as the values supporting transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
2016 Feb 17
Aline Lerner's analysis of mock technical interviews reported that roughly 25 percent of candidates performed consistently across repeated interviews. The data gave engineering teams a measured reason to distrust a pass or fail read from a single sitting.
2016 Nov 17
Etsy published a facilitation guide that moved from the philosophy of blamelessness to running debriefings as a learned skill. It emphasized resisting premature causal stories and gathering multiple perspectives.
2017
The 2017 report was the last listed in the earlier Puppet partnership series. DORA later continued the research as a Google Cloud program.
2017
PMI updated the sixth edition with agile content and published the Agile Practice Guide with the Agile Alliance.
2017
The 2017 revision described Scrum's use beyond software development, including work on products, operations, and complex domains.
2017 Nov
The 2017 revision continued the guide's update sequence after the 2011, 2013, and 2016 editions. It kept the framework as a maintained reference rather than a frozen set of ceremonies.
2018
DORA's 2018 report described generative culture as cooperation, trust, voice, and learning, and associated it with stronger software-delivery and organizational outcomes. It made culture a measured capability in the DevOps research program.
2018
The workbook added a case study, templates, action-item guidance, incentives, and warning signs for a postmortem culture. It translated the earlier SRE philosophy into operating practices a team can adopt.
2018
A large-scale study of Google's Critique logs finds median time-to-approval under 4 hours, most changes under 24 lines, and developers spending about 3.2 hours per week reviewing — establishing empirical baselines for modern review practices.
2018 Aug
The 2018 report examined availability as a measurement of software performance. This extended the delivery discussion beyond release speed and immediate stability.
2018 Nov
AWS introduces a self-service tool for reviewing workloads against framework questions and producing improvement plans.
2019 Sep
The first edition established the four fundamental team types and three interaction patterns as an adaptive organizational-design model.
26 milestones
2020 Jun
A shared template library made team-interaction modeling reproducible in Google Draw, Google Slides, and diagrams.net.
2020 Sep
Google published Four Keys as an open-source pipeline for collecting change, deployment, and incident events. The project made event definitions and joins explicit implementation work.
2020 Nov
The November 2020 Guide clarified the Scrum Team as self-managing and retained the framework's focus on empirical adaptation.
2020 Nov
The current official Scrum Guide was released in November 2020. It defines Scrum through the 2020 accountabilities, events, artifacts, and commitments used in this course.
2020 Dec
The December 2020 Kanban Guide defined a minimal reference for managing flow and improving delivery. It gave practitioners a shared baseline for the workflow and flow metrics discussed here.
2021 Feb
Microsoft Research published the SPACE framework for developer productivity. It described productivity as multidimensional rather than reducible to one activity measure.
2021 Mar
Community contributors added templates for PowerPoint, diagrams.net, Miro, and Figma, extending the mapping practice across common tools.
2021 Aug
The seventh edition organized guidance around principles and performance domains across predictive, adaptive, and hybrid approaches.
2021 Oct 28
The EEOC began an initiative focused on ensuring that artificial intelligence and other software used in employment decisions comply with federal civil-rights laws. Tool governance became a named selection-process concern.
2021 Nov
AWS introduces Custom Lenses so teams can apply internal best practices alongside the framework during workload reviews.
2021 Nov
DORA described reliability as the renamed and broader successor to availability. The change covered dimensions beyond availability, including response latency and content validity.
2021 Dec 30
The Journal of Applied Psychology published the re-analysis showing that common meta-analytic range-restriction corrections had inflated validity estimates by .10 to .20 points. Corrected, structured interviews rank first at about .42 and cognitive ability tests fall to about .31.
2022 Jan
NAV described platform products that reduce product-team cognitive load and a progression from early collaboration toward X-as-a-Service.
2022 Mar
Improbable described stream-aligned teams, team APIs, and time-bounded collaboration while evolving its multiplayer platform.
2022 May
Docker documented how it reshaped product development around Team Topologies concepts while rebuilding its organization.
2022 Sep
The 2022 report described High, Medium, and Low delivery-performance clusters rather than an Elite cluster. This changed how the report summarized survey results.
2023
Google Research framed developer productivity as a human-centered measurement problem involving technological and sociological conditions. It reinforced the need to evaluate those conditions together.
2023 May 18
The EEOC issued technical assistance on assessing adverse impact for software, algorithms, and artificial intelligence used in employment selection under Title VII. Automated screening inherits the same job-relatedness and adverse-impact duties as any other test.
2023 Jul 5
Enforcement of Local Law 144 began for covered automated employment decision tools. Employers using covered tools in the city faced bias audit and candidate-notice requirements.
2023 Jul 5
New York City began enforcing its requirement that employers using automated employment decision tools complete an independent bias audit, publish a summary, and give candidates notice. The first binding statute aimed specifically at automated hiring tools.
2024
Tools like CodeRabbit and GitHub Copilot begin posting AI-generated PR summaries and inline suggestions, splitting the review budget between automated first-pass analysis and human design judgment.
2024
Google's incident-management guide places postmortems, corrective actions, broad sharing, and aggregate learning in the wider incident lifecycle. It presents blameless learning as part of an operating system for response and improvement.
2024 Jul
Telenet described using Team Topologies thinking to address structural friction after its earlier agile-at-scale adoption.
2024 Nov
Trade Me documented the conditions that led it to introduce a thinnest viable platform and the lessons from the change.
2025 May
The May 2025 guide continued the public Kanban reference as a living document. Its timing remains outside the most recent twelve months, preserving this tab as history rather than release news.
2026
GitHub ships stacked pull requests in private preview, acknowledging that the single-branch PR model does not fit how teams ship changes in pieces — a gap Gerrit addressed by design in 2008.