From burden to breakthrough: engineering compliance for the digital age

I’ve spent over a decade in the payments industry, and if there’s one universal challenge for engineering teams, it’s compliance. Regulations and standards sit at the crossroads of two fundamentally different worlds. Engineers thrive on innovation, always pushing the boundaries of what technology can automate. Compliance, on the other hand, is rooted in control and safety. So far, its digital evolution has largely been a direct translation of analog processes where rules copied and pasted into a digital format rather than reimagined for the digital age.

The result? Engineers accept it as the necessary evil: everyone knows it has to be done, but few truly understand it, and even fewer enjoy it. And at the end it all tuns into a mad scramble before audits and certifications, where teams drop everything to review processes, identify gaps, fix them, and package it all up for the auditors. If you’ve worked in a regulated industry, you know this drill. It’s exhausting, disruptive, and pulls focus away from what really matters: building great products.

But there’s another side to this story, an untapped opportunity to rethink compliance for the digital era. What if, instead of treating it as a bureaucratic burden, we engineered compliance to work like the rest of our modern software practices? What if we could integrate compliance seamlessly into our workflows, automating controls, monitoring effectiveness, and making audits painless?

This is where Test-Driven Compliance (TDC) comes in. Think of it as compliance designed by and for engineers. Instead of static checklists and manual reviews, we translate compliance requirements into testable controls, essentially, test cases that can be automated and continuously validated. This approach shifts compliance from a reactive, last-minute scramble to an ongoing, integrated process.

Imagine applying the same philosophy that enables thousands of software deployments per day to compliance and auditing. What if we aimed for a thousand micro-audits a day, catching issues early and at a fraction of the cost, effort, and stress we endure today? That’s the future we should be building.

Formalizing compliance controls as test code has an immediate benefit: it makes compliance tangible and intuitive for developers. If you enjoy testing software, you might actually find this fun! These controls run both in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines as well as in real-time, meaning compliance issues are caught as they happen, reducing risk, minimizing last-minute surprises, and eliminating disruptive context-switching.

Taking this further, we can redefine audits themselves. Instead of periodic, high-stakes events, audits become continuous, automated test plans, repeatable, scalable, and executable on demand with minimal human intervention. This shift transforms audits from an operational headache into a seamless, always-on validation mechanism.

Test-Driven Compliance isn’t just a better way to handle regulatory requirements, it’s a mindset shift that aligns compliance with modern engineering practices. It turns compliance from an afterthought into an integral, automated part of building great products. And honestly, I can’t wait for that future to become reality.