We’re developers, and we love best practices—but let’s be honest, we often bypass them.

And you know what? That’s okay! You are not alone!

This popular GitHub post resonates!

People will forget all your contributions and hard work but not the time you were forced to push into the main branch!

Why?

Because sometimes speed, urgency, or unforeseen challenges force us to take shortcuts. The real problem isn’t occasional bypassing—it’s when these bypasses go unnoticed, untracked, and unaddressed.

Best practices aren’t about perfection; they’re about consistency, visibility, and accountability.

That's why we rely on an ever-growing stack of tools to automate our processes. We trust these tools! For example:

• Jenkins for CI/CD
• GitHub for code management
• Jira for task tracking

But here’s the issue:

These tools operate in isolation—they don’t share context.

In a recent interview, a tech leader shared:

"A failed test in GitHub doesn’t stop a Jira ticket from being marked as 'Done'."

That’s a bad practice—and it leads to teams firefighting 500 errors in production, blindfolded and in the dark.

Who knows what caused the error?

• Was it a skipped test?
• A broken workflow run?
• A failed check?
• Or maybe an impactful update, like a database migration?

Without clear visibility and actionable insights, finding answers feels impossible.

Errors don’t exist in isolation—they leave clues scattered across different tools. The challenge is connecting those dots and focusing on the right clues.

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The solution: Enforceable best practices

As a team, we must always know what’s happening across our toolchains.

This means:

• Best practices must be enforceable—not just referenced.
• Critical steps can’t be optional; they must be monitored, enforced, and standardized.
• Every skipped test, failed check, or bypassed review should trigger visibility and accountability.

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How can Warestack help you monitor and enforce best practices?

Warestack is a free DevOps tool that helps teams monitor and enforce best practices across events like issues, pull requests, and deployment reviews.

We do this in three simple steps:

Step 1: Connect your tools

Integrate tools like GitHub, Jira, and more to access key events as a team directly from Warestack.

Step 2: Enable best practices to monitor

Enable and customize pre-built best practices—or suggest new ones!

Examples:

• Require at least two reviewers per pull request.
• Enforce conventional commit message formats.
• All required status checks must pass before merging.
• Deployments must be reviewed by someone other than the requestor.

Customize rules to match your team’s workflow, and pick severity and minimum assignees!

Step 3: Monitor violations

Head to the Monitoring dashboard to see flagged violations, complete with severity levels. Access info such as who, when, what.

Example: Pull request review

• PR has no reviewers assigned (minimum required: 2).
• PR was merged without required reviews.
• Commit message doesn’t follow the standard format.

Everyone on the team can access the dashboard and stay aware of potential production risks.

Example: Deployment review

This deployment was self-approved by the same person who initiated it—a clear bad practice!

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What’s Next for Warestack?

We’re currently focusing on enforcement, such as canceling events with unmet conditions. For example, force-cancel a deployment if it was self-approved by the same person who initiated it. This will force the initiator to request the deployment review from a different team member to ensure independent verification. This ensures accountability and visibility. That release will come out soon!

Also, we will soon support custom best practices and evaluating them against industry standards. Soon, we’ll help you identify if your team’s custom standards align with global best practices.

Further, DORA metrics are a key focus for us! Soon, we’ll help you monitor critical metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate and take proactive decisions to prevent issues. For example, if a GitHub workflow run fails, Warestack can automatically move the associated ticket back to "In Progress" and notify the team on Slack!

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Do you like what we are building?

Then we’d love your help!
We’re also looking for pilot users!

• No payment is required.
• No hidden commitments.
• Just honest feedback from developers like you.

We're creating a community hub where anyone can suggest a best practice.

If you’re interested, reach out, and let’s chat!

Thanks for reading,

Stelios