Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations Kindle Edition

This book was excellent, I read it twice before reviewing. They scienced the crap out of DevOps and go to painstaking lengths to identify what can and should be measured, and what those predict. Very helpful if you are looking to baseline your DevOps capability and identify areas for improvement around key outcomes.Fair warning though, the book doesn't go into detail on how the capabilities identified/measured work together, the correct combinations, or proper order. Recommend picking up Lean Enterprise and Continuous Delivery by Jez for that. So it's not that the authors are naive to this, it's just not the intent of this book. On the contrary I'd say they are very aware of what can be measured and what would be speculation--and this book is scoped to what they could measure.With that in mind, it actually places appropriate limitations on the conclusions you can draw from their results--an atypical (but welcome) admission they make early on. They can only measure outcomes, not intents. So they show behaviors and how they correlate to outcomes, but warn the reader to understand the why behind those behaviors before trying to adopt them blindly. Basically a nice way of saying, "Don't be a #cargocult."In Lean Enterprise, Jez and his co-authors make several recommendations on combinations and order, as well as the why behind each. I appreciate that this book only focuses on what can be measured--it provides a good baseline from which to look at my own organization's practices. But it does assume that the reader is familiar with DevOps and isn't looking to understand the why or the how.I highly recommend this book.

Accelerate will convince you that modern agile/devops development practices are worth investing in and will bring you business benefits. At least, that is the goal of the book. It explores survey results from 3 years of DevOps survey, explain why they are trustworthy and relevant and what you can learn from them. It does so in a very convincing way if I may say so. I personally experienced most of the promoted practices to be useful and therefore probably didn't need convincing. If I did, this book might have been able to do so.The DevOps survey is an industry survey originally done by Puppet Labs for exploring Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices in the industry. The first DevOps survey was in 2014 and the book takes 3 years of survey results (3 surveys) and shares the results and the conclusions of these results. The book consists of three parts: (1) What we found, (2) The Research, and (3) Transformation.The first part shares the results and conclusions of the DevOps survey. Good development and continuous delivery practices result in less stress, better quality, and better business results. This part summarizes different practices and how they correlated with improved business success. I felt most of the practices were not controversial (for someone with an agile background) although there were some exceptions (how far should you go in not standardizing tools) and areas not covered. Especially the area of organizational and team structure was not covered and, at times, the book suggested traditional organizations and traditional role divisions. This was unfortunate as it would have been interesting inclusions... but not covered well in this book.I actually enjoyed the second part of the book, which had nothing to do with software development but explains the different research methods and practices applied. It explains different data collection strategies and why a survey was the right strategy for the questions the authors were asking. One skepticism I had (still have) is that the selected target population (people familiar with DevOps) causes a self-selection bias and therefore invalidates the findings when extrapolating to the entire industry. The authors, unfortunately, didn't discuss that much, but it did come up with arguments on why they should restrict the target population to people familiar with DevOps. The arguments were good... though not fully convinced me. Still, I found part 2 unusual and interesting.Part 3, transformation, was small and not written by the authors. Instead it provided a case study of lean management practices by Steve and Karen Whitley Bell. The case study was from ING Netherlands. Although I enjoyed the case study, I did wonder at times why it was included as it didn't actually talk about the majority of the practices of the book. It mostly focused on Lean Management and Lean Transformation practices. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading the case study.All in all, Accelerate was an enjoyable little book. It didn't provide huge new insights to me, which was not the intention of the book. The intend was to share evidence (science) that some existing modern practices actually work. In that, the book succeeded. I would not recommend the book to people who want to understand these modern practices in-depth, for that, this is the wrong book. I would very much recommend the book for people who want to understand (and be convinced) that these modern DevOps/Development/Agile practices can have a positive effect on your business... and they are worth investing time and resources in. Good book, recommended, 4 stars.

I’ve lived in and consulted for many companies that would benefit from transforming their culture. If you are a leader in a company, and you 1) want to validate perceptions of company performance from the inside, and 2) want to continuously improve, read on.“The most innovative companies and highest-performing organizations are always striving to be better. High performing companies have 46 times more frequent code deployments, 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy, 170 times faster mean time to recover from downtime, and 5 times lower change failure rate (1/5 as likely for a change to fail).”The reasons for embarking on this DevOps journey of acceleration and transformation are many. Leaders who want to realize this level of performance will get more loyalty and work out of their current people and attract awesome new ones. They will build better, more secure software--and a mature software delivery capability provides a competitive advantage to any business. This book provides evidence and research to back these assertions.Accelerate offers clear and compelling guidance to begin this shift no matter a company’s current level of maturity, covering the spectrum of roles from leaders to doers, from coders to architects to managers. If you are pressed for time, chapters are focused and easy to consider in turn, and provide excellent implementations recommendations.Leaders will be especially inspired by Part 3, a case study about a real Transformation. It all started by the willingness to change.DevOps is a cultural movement that feeds value delivery and growth within an organization. If you are responsible for any aspect of building secure, resilient rapidly evolving distributed systems, buy this book! Read it on your next plane ride and begin your journey of differentiation and transformation with the inspirational and executable guidance it offers.

The book does a great job of providing an evidence-based approach to software delivery and introduces the DORA metrics in a way that makes a lot of sense. I love to gift the book to any managers and engineering leads who join my team. We have even run book reviews to further implement the ideas presented in this book.

Good book!

Excelente, da una perspectiva completa de como aumentar él performance de forma holistica.

It's perfect

So many insights to help organizations to get to the next level. Read it and this book on your desk, it will always help you.

The book not only gives an account of the famous DORA research, but does very well to break down the findings into many practical examples of what the practical applicability is. I'm a Developer Experience professional, and this is a foundational work. I strongly recommend this book to all technical leadership. It's surprisingly readable, but has genuinely transformational content.