Introducing Version 8 of the Hierarchy of Engineering Needs
- Stuart Collins
- Oct 7
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 8
We’re excited to share version 8.0.0 of the Hierarchy of Engineering Needs (HoEN). This update reflects the our collective experience, feedback and industry trends from actively working with hundreds more Engineers and leaders since v7.
Engineering systems succeed when they balance people, practices, technology and resilience. V8 sharpens the model to reflect that reality, while also responding to new opportunities and challenges especially the role of AI.
Why the changes?
Three main themes shaped this release:
AI as an amplifier, not a pillar
AI is already influencing coding, testing, observability, and even career development. But our experience and opinion as detailed in Is AI essential to optimise your flow? tells us AI is not a standalone need. Instead, it’s a force multiplier that lifts the maturity of existing needs. In v8.0.0, AI appears across the model as an indicator of maturity, not as a new layer.
People remain at the core
Even in a world where AI is woven into engineering work, people remain the key to any system’s success. That’s why this release strengthens people focused needs:
People and Purpose and Operating Rhythms at the foundation.
Aligned Accountability to reinforce shared ownership and accountability to drive work through the system.
Generative Culture at the top level, highlighting how culture drives innovation and resilience. (Based on Ron Westrum’s research “A typology of organisation culture”)
Quality of Service as a counterbalance
Software teams are always making a trade-off on speed of new value generation and protection of value already delivered. For the protection of existing value, there are overlapping practices of:
Observability
Reliability / resilience engineering
Chaos engineering
Disaster recovery
Quality of Service (QoS) - a term borrowed from networking serves well to represent the common goal of all these practices - proactively inspect and manage service performance inline with user expectations of speed, availability and error rate. This QoS concept and other community feedback reflects suggestions made by Michelle Casey - see Observability - suggested revisions to HoEN
What’s new in v8.0.0?
Summary of changes from v7.0.1 to v8. See the full change log on github
Need | Rational | |
➕ New️ | 3-aligned-accountability | Ask teams for outcomes over outputs. |
5-quality-of-service | A counterbalance to value generation. | |
5-generative-culture | Making difficult decisions early and often. | |
♻️ Changed
| 5-hypothesis-driven swapped for 5-value-generation | Hypothesis-driven is a subset in the overall pursuit of new value generation. |
3-SLIs-SLOs becomes 3-service-metrics | Part of treating Observability as a practice. | |
✍️ Updated | 5-governance | Standardisation added for team predicitability. Disaster recovery aspects moved to new need 5-quality-of-service. |
1-observability renamed to 1-logging-monitoring | Part of treating Observability as a practice. | |
3-continuous-integration moved down one level to 2-continuous-integration | Daily integration of changes to main needs to happen at managed work level as it is difficult to adopt at a higher level. | |
1-people-purpose edits | Scope and signals reflect generative culture and accountability. | |
1-operating-rhythms edits | Foundations for QoS and building generative culture habits. | |
AI concepts added to multiple needs | Where AI helps solve problems and where it amplifies existing problems. | |
🪦Retired | 5-value-trust | Removed as a need more of an outcome. |
5-chaos-engineering | Chaos Engineering is a subset of QoS. | |
What this means going forward
This release is about recognising how modern engineering systems really grow:
AI enhances, but doesn’t replace, engineering practices.
People, culture, and accountability remain the foundations of success.
Resilience engineering is essential for sustaining quality of service.
View the full model including all these changes at http://engineeringneeds.io