---
title: "The Tarmac 10, explained: how we de-risk delivery"
description: "Quality isn't a promise you make on a sales call. It's a process you can point to. Here's the set of engineering practices behind every Tarmac engagement."
canonical_url: "https://www.tarmac.io/resources/tarmac-10-explained/"
last_updated: "2026-10-07"
---

[Resources](https://www.tarmac.io/resources/) / Engineering

# The Tarmac 10, explained: how we de-risk delivery

Quality isn't a promise you make on a sales call. It's a process you can point to. Here's the set of engineering practices behind every Tarmac engagement.

Tarmac · June 10, 2026 Engineering

Ask ten software firms about quality and you’ll get ten variations of “we care a lot.” That’s not a process. It’s a feeling. The Tarmac 10 is our attempt to make quality concrete: ten engineering practices that de-risk the delivery lifecycle, applied on every project, that a client can actually inspect.

## Quality as a system, not a virtue

The practices cluster around a few ideas:

-   **Small, single-purpose changes.** Tiny, reviewable pull requests catch problems early and make releases boring. Boring releases are good releases.
-   **Automated tests as a gate, not an afterthought.** Tests are mandatory, not optional, and they run in CI on every change.
-   **Peer review at every stage.** Nothing merges on one person’s say-so. Shared code ownership keeps the bus factor high and the surprises low.
-   **CI/CD that supports many releases a day.** Speed and quality aren’t a trade-off when the pipeline enforces the standard for you.
-   **Repository hygiene.** A clean, well-documented codebase is the difference between onboarding in days and onboarding in months.

## Why it compounds

Any one of these is common sense. The value is in doing all of them, consistently, so that velocity and quality reinforce each other instead of competing. A team that ships small, tested, reviewed changes through a solid pipeline moves _faster_ over time, not slower, because it isn’t paying down a mountain of avoidable defects.

## The point is transparency

The Tarmac 10 also gives clients something to hold us to. It’s paired with honest reporting, fast issue resolution, and contracts you can cancel on 30 days’ notice. When the process is legible, trust doesn’t depend on a good feeling. It depends on evidence.

That evidence is a big part of why [98% of our new work comes from referrals](https://www.tarmac.io/resources/why-referrals/).

Keep reading

## More on Engineering

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Confluence PNGs are invisible to your coding agents. C4, ERD, and sequence diagrams belong in the repo as Mermaid text, not a picture nobody updates.

August 25, 2026](https://www.tarmac.io/resources/c4-diagrams-for-ai-agents/)[

### A definition of done for humans and agents

Works on my machine is not a definition of done. A field guide to the checks that make done mean done, for human pull requests and AI agents alike.

July 30, 2026](https://www.tarmac.io/resources/definition-of-done-humans-and-agents/)[

### Go, Rust, or Python: picking a backend at scale

When success at scale strains Python, the fix is rarely a rewrite. How to choose Go, Rust, or Zig for the one service that needs it.

July 27, 2026](https://www.tarmac.io/resources/go-rust-python-backend-at-scale/)

## Let’s build something worth taking off.

Tell us what you’re building. We’ll assemble the senior team to ship it.

[Let’s team up→](https://www.tarmac.io/contact/?source=resources-tarmac-10-explained)

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