Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD (PDF)

Description

Winner of the Shingo Publication AwardAccelerate your organization to win in the marketplace.How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we’ve been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn’t matter―that it can’t provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance―and what drives it―using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations.Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance. This book is ideal for management at every level.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “We strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in a digital transformation for solid guidance about what works, what doesn’t work, and what doesn’t matter.” — Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Authors of the Lean Software Development Series”A must read! In a sea of books about technology approaches, Accelerate stands out in its clarity and practicality.” — Karen Martin, Author, Clarity First and The Outstanding Organization”Excellent! As well as conclusively showing that DevOps outcomes are faster, cheaper AND safer, this book is an excellent case study for robust survey design and analysis.” — Adrian Cockroft”This is the kind of foresight that CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs desperately need if their company is going to survive in this new software-centric world.Anyone that doesn’t read this book will be replaced by someone that has.” — Thomas A. Limoncelli, Co-Author of The Practice of Cloud System Administration“’Here, do this!’ The evidence presented in Accelerate is a triumph of research, tenacity and insight, proving not just correlation but a causal link between good technical and management behaviours and business performance. It also exposes the myth of “maturity models” and offers a realistic, actionable alternative. As an independent consultant working at the intersection of people, technology, process, and organisation design this is manna from heaven!As chapter 3 concludes: ‘You can act your way to a better culture through implementing these practices in technology organizations’. There is no mystical culture magic, just 24 concrete, specific capabilities that will lead not only to better business results, but more importantly to happier, healthier, more motivated people and an organisation people want to work at. I will be giving copies of this book to all my clients.” — Dan North, Independent Technology and Organization consultant”The ‘art’ of constructing a building is a well understood engineering practice nowadays. However, in the software world, we have been been looking for patterns and practices that can deliver the same predictable and reliable results whilst minimizing waste and producing the increasingly high performance our businesses demand.Accelerate provides research backed, quantifiable and real world principles to create world class, high performing IT teams enabling amazing business outcomes.Backed by the two leading thought leaders (Kim and Humble) in the DevOps community and world class research from PHD Forsgren, this book is a highly recommended asset!” — Jonathan Fletcher, Group CTO, Hiscox”In their book Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim don’t break any new conceptual ground regarding agile, lean and DevOps. Instead, they provide something that might be even more valuable which is a look inside the methodological rigor of their data collection and analysis approach which lead them to their earlier conclusions on the key capabilities that make IT organizations better contributors to the business. This is a book that I will gladly be placing on my bookshelf next to the other great works by the authors.” — Cameron Haight, VP & CTO, Americas, VMware”Accelerate does a fantastic job of explaining not only what changes organizations should make to improve their software delivery performance, but also the why, enabling people at all levels to truly understand how to level up their organizations.” — Ryn Daniels, Infrastructure Operations Engineer at Travis CI and author of Effective DevOps”With this work, the authors have made a significant contribution to the understanding and application of DevOps. They show that when properly understood, DevOps is more than just a fad or a new name for an old concept. Their work illustrates how DevOps can improve the state of the art in organizational design, software development culture, and systems architecture. And beyond merely showing, they advance the DevOps community’s qualitative findings with research-based insights that I have heard from no other source.” — Baron Schwartz, Founder & CEO of VividCortex and Co-Author of High Performance MySQL About the Author Dr. Nicole Forsgren does research and strategy at Google Cloud following the acquisition of her startup DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) by Google. She is best known for her work measuring the technology process and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been an entrepreneur, professor, sysadmin, and performance engineer. Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona, and is a Research Affiliate at Clemson University and Florida International University. She lives in San Francisco, CA.Jez Humble is co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery. He is currently researching how to build high performing teams at his startup, DevOps Research and Assessment, LLC, and teaching at UC Berkeley. He lives in California.Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, Beyond The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and The Visible Ops Handbook. He is founder of IT Revolution, hosts the DevOps Enterprise Summit conferences, and speaks around the world. He lives in Portland, OR with his wife and children.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I read this book to complete the DevOps picture from the manager’s and the architect’s point of view.As DevOps engineer and developer with 30 years of experience, I find hard to stomach the notion supported by this book that developers should be free to choose their tools. The book goes on to assure us that the upside of doing so far outweighs the downside. I strongly disagree.There is a thing called ‘technical debt,’ which is the sum of time and effort one has to pay to keep up with the tools one is ‘married’ to. To master a tool one has not only to learn the first version encountered but also those that follow in its evolution, and track new and discontinued capabilities during the course of the tool’s life. This happens whether you learn C, Python, Java, or any other substantial language and tool in which one needs to remain proficient.Now imagine multiple projects using languages and tools at the whim of the team members. The overall list of technologies in use would be a long open-ended list in no time. What skill requirements do you pass on to HR to recruit new talent? How many candidates will be a good match for your large list of technical requirements?The argument in favor of such dangerous freedom is that otherwise developers may have to use tools they hate.Choosing the staff and the tools of a project requires careful consideration. It’s at this point that you choose the best possible match. Consult the team members if you will, but it should not be up to them to decide, but to the project leader. Otherwise imagine if Team A chooses Confluence for documentation, while Team B uses Office 360, and yet Team C goes for TEX. After a few years you will have a rainbow of documentation formats. How is that better than having a consistent one?Developers like to use the tools they mastered, when not looking to learn a new one, and yes that is important, but what you do is to group people with skills pertinent to the project from the outset, so nobody will hate it.This notion that developers should be the ones choosing a project’s technologies, really broke the spell of this book for me. How could they say that, and what sort of measurements did lead to such result?

⭐When I originally posted my review, I said that I would be glad to amend or even delete it based upon my concerns being answered or their being shown to be incorrect. One of the authors, Jez Humble, took the time to respond to me. I still have some lesser concerns but I am satisfied by his response. There was peer review of the research and DORA was not formed until after the research had been submitted for review. Since I was wrong about those points, I have upgraded my rating and have revised my review which starts in the next paragraph.Note that I make no claim to be as skilled when it comes to research as is Forsgren. Hands down, she has an impressive resume and experience which makes me look like what you scrape off the bottom of your shoe in comparison. When I approach this book and the research, I am concerned regarding the use of Snowball research. However, I recognize how hard it is to conduct research in the workplace and the so-called “real world” outside the laboratory. When reading this book, my main point would be to keep in mind what the authors openly say, to their credit, that the research presented does not lead itself to predictive or causal analysis. However, it can be used to draw inferences that those implementing DevOps can find very valuable. Use this book to expand your ideas of how to improve software delivery.

⭐If Continuous Delivery, DevOps Handbook, and other like books are technical required reading, this book should be managerial required reading. Accelerate highlights the business value for maturing a DevOps capability by covering a new way to measure software delivery. The perspective I obtained from Accelerate is there is a science to identify the right work at the right time to create a smarter SDLC. The point is, it isn’t really DevOps, but BizDevSecOps, working in a Generative culture of harmony bliss.

⭐One thing I think the book needs to make more clear is this is advanced stuff. The principles apply across all engineering teams, but the methods do not. For example, it is explained the reducing time-to-deploy is a good thing. And it is. And they talk about the evils of manual QA and a staging environment in hurting that process. Agreed. But in order to get rid of those things, you need the right tooling in place to have good automated tests, easy non-destructive rollbacks, and generally lots of visibility/confidence in the pipeline. Removing manual QA and your staging environment before you are ready is just shooting yourself in the foot.

⭐Every software professional–especially leaders–should read this, internalize it, and take its advice to heart. This is THE WAY to successfully deliver software in the modern world, and there are actionable takeaways throughout the first half of the book.The second half is all about their methodology. It’s really extensive and, to be honest, super boring, but it does a good job of anticipating objections to their methodology and invalidating them scientifically.There is no other source of as comprehensive and as insightful of information as what you’ll find here. I’m hoping for an updated version every five years or so, as the DORA surveys continue to provide more and more lessons and wisdom.

⭐This book is essential reading for anybody who’s writing software and needs to deal with management. For one thing, it finally puts to rest that old chestnut that you loose productivity if you spend time writing tests. Using real studies and actual metrics, it proves once and for all that improving code quality IMPROVES productivity. And that’s just in the first chapter! I can’t recommend this book too highly.

⭐This book uses child size fonts. The book feels weighty but it’s highly padded. I feel it’s padded for a simple reason. It’s not that in-depth and much of what is stated is simple or rather obvious; or is far better explained with detail and context in Amazon and Microsoft White papers. I was recommended this book and I have and rate the lean series but this book is poor in my view. Too little depth, too fluffy and too expensive overall.

⭐I’m a software and found this book was too high level, I guess I was expected something offering real practical advice and real world experience, especially having read the fantastic continuous delivery. This book is a summary of why things like automated testing and continuous integration are sound practices but this is already preaching to the converted.It had some new pieces of advice and guidance for me, and I especially like how it brings all together the best and well established practices, but generally it didn’t offer me much, but maybe I’m not the intended audience? This would be a great book if you were a struggling CTO or someone stuck in the old ways of manual testing etc. If you run a failing IT company or department then by all means read this, but to the established folks already doing the right things then pick this up 2nd hand on the cheap.

⭐Why do I like this book and why do I think it is worthy of reading, reviewing and recommending ahead of a host of other books on DevOps?1. It is short enough and accessible enough to be reasonably recommended to and consumed by a range of roles outside of the technology function.2. It is written by and recommended by a number of people who clearly know their onions: Jez Humble, Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim are all multipublished, award winning authors who have been involved in the State of DevOps survey for an extended period of time. Martin Fowler (who writes a forward) is one of the founding fathers of Agile and has written profoundly on many aspects of the programming craft3. It seeks to justify its assertions with a range of quantitative methods which are pitched at the right level…you could use these ideas both to structure a business case and as a measurement framework to report against it.4. It explores a range of technical, organizational, managerial and cultural aspects that combine to provide a step change in software development capability. It isolates atomic drivers of improvement. It describes positive and negative feedback loops to be aware of.5. It connects those ideas into a coherent programme and suggests how you might go about adoption.Apart from all of the practical ideas and the way it connects them I think the most interesting thought it left me with was this. Not only is high performance in the technology space going to offer a key differentiator for businesses in the future but that high performing technology function can be a catalyst to a high performing organization full stop.

⭐A must read book.It’s a study of thousands of companies, the development practices they use and whether they succeed or not.It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to evidence that doing things the “right” way is a key contributor to business success. Teams that deploy more often have better success. Organizations that are safe to work in (where you can raise concerns without fear of being fired) have better success.Read it!

⭐This book is an excellent read for anyone who has been interested in organisational performance and transformations.In the pursuit of speed of delivery some forget quality and learning. In the lounge run, this ends up in failure. A lot of the first part presented the results of the research while the second part is all about how the research was done.It was not an easy read because a lot of it was presenting facts and explaining methods of research and why surveys and how to frame the right questions etc. However, once you get through, you’ll absolutely love it.

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