Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Paved road
A well-supported default platform and toolchain that makes the good path the easy one. Teams may leave it if they take on the ownership cost themselves. A paved road nobody would choose is a mandate in costume.
Where the standard develops it
- TJ-3Code review and quality standardsIncluding standards for AI-generated code.
Related terms
- AI governance
- The explicit, proportionate policy for AI-assisted work.
- Aligned autonomy
- Direction, priorities and boundary standards set centrally, with methods left to teams.
- Bus factor
- The number of people who could leave before critical knowledge or capability is lost.
- Contract testing
- Automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers, which catches a breaking change at the boundary before integration does.
- Innovation budget
- An explicit, bounded allocation for evaluating new technology, with pilots that have criteria, a contained blast radius and an honest review.
- Interface discipline
- Versioning, a deprecation policy, contract tests and communicated change for a widely used interface.
- Service ownership
- Every service has a named owner responsible for its operation, its interface stability, its documentation and its future.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Paved road. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.paved-road). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/paved-road