The Five Ideals summarized from the book “The Unicorn Project”.

• Development teams should be able to make changes to their code base and deploy, without impacting or coordinating with others.
• Decouple applications and create abstractions to achieve locality.
• Simplify code bases through abstractions as well.
  • The easier the code is to reason about, the easier changes are, and the less it breaks.

• Remove distractions, dependencies, and other road blocks that prevent developers from doing development work.
• With the above removed, developers will be able to focus and enjoy the work, producing better code.

• Build time into projects/schedules to allow teams to address technical debt and architecture.
  • These are the brittle things that break in an application/architecture first.
• Improve anything that impedes a developer from coding.

• Teams should be able to talk about bugs/problems in an application or architecture, without blame/backlash.
• Blame-less postmortems after a production down event or major bug are critical to implementing actual fixes and preventing the same thing from happening.
  • This should be a learning experience for everyone, not a blame session.

• Core focus - everything a customer is willing to pay for.
  • Example: Web services, APIs, databases, storage.
• Context focus - everything else.
  • Example: Any system that supports employees. (such as HR systems)
• While context is important, don't let it take over focus from core customer concerns.