Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations book cover

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

Price
$16.89
Format
Paperback
Pages
288
Publisher
IT Revolution Press
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1942788331
Dimensions
5.89 x 0.85 x 9.09 inches
Weight
11 ounces

Description

"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 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.

Features & Highlights

  • "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 and 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 of
  • Clarity First
  • and
  • The Outstanding Organization
  • Winner of the Shingo Publication Award
  • Accelerate 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.
  • "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, coauthor of
  • The Practice of Cloud System Administration

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(869)
★★★★
25%
(724)
★★★
15%
(434)
★★
7%
(203)
23%
(665)

Most Helpful Reviews

✓ Verified Purchase

Great blend of SW Delivery Excellence wrapped around Technical Practices and Leadership Foundation

Great practical blend of leading thoughts around how you create and continuously evolve Software Delivery Excellence.

Covers the 24 capabilities, the four true measures that align to tempo and stability, and introduces the Westrum model and Continuum.

Combines Lean Software Development, Phoenix Project, DevOps Handbook and several concepts from different books around Lean Management and Practices.. marrying culture, DevOps and lean in one.

Includes research methods and a data section.. and examples of how to measure stressing this is a journey that can’t be outsourced, and needs to grow within continuously to be competitive and thrive.
8 people found this helpful
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Evidence modern development practices pay off?

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.
5 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Not worth it, if you have more than 5 years of experience

Old ideas, rehashed as new...bought this based on reviews:)
5 people found this helpful
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Marketing report for one of DevOps companies extended to a book

It's quite an interesting report of the current state of DevOps based on a lot of surveys mostly of the employees the customers of one company (Puppet). But, unfortunately, the authors have made a lot of claims which their data don't support.
Just one fact they mentioned - they' ve got responses from around 1000 employees of 355 companies, so in average about 3 employee per company. How can you claim any causation of the opinions of 3 employees and company culture, profitability, etc.?
5 people found this helpful
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Too long but makes its point

Like many (most) business books, this one could be summed up in a long article. The authors spend a lot of time convincing readers their research methods are valid. I'll give them that - their claims are better founded than the claims of many books.

DevOps is a good thing and applying modern and enlightened management techniques is a good thing. I believe them, but I don't see these being radical claims.

Some of the claims (substantial increases in financial metrics) are hard to believe can be definitively tied back to the authors' recommended practices. If they made more modest claims, they would be more convincing.
5 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Borderline useless really. Very little actionable information.

Skimmed through a few chapters the day it arrived and was disappointed to find it's your typical business read. For example, continuous delivery covered in only a few pages and provided little information to leverage in a conversation with my engineering team. I'll be returning it.
4 people found this helpful
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Bah

If I have to read the phrase "win in the marketplace" one more time, I'm going to jump out of a window
2 people found this helpful
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This could be a 5-page blog

The book has good ideas based on their research but the authors are too wordy to describe a simple thing. I'm not sure why to explain in so many details things that are very simple and basic to understand. For instance: "[these are] tests to make sure that items that are supposed to be related are actually related (e.g., if items are supposed to measure organizational culture, then they do measure organizational culture)."
So, we have 30 words to say "correctly related".

Also, don't buy the audiobook. It doesn't worth $2. The girl narrating is like her baby is sleeping in the next room and she doesn't want to wake him up. To make it worse, there are many tables on this book, and each one she says: "See table X in the additional material PDF". It's just really really boring. So, the whole book could be a 5-page blog.
2 people found this helpful
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Average book, I didnt learn new breakthroughs

Had higher expectations for this book. The executives at my company where touting it as part of the CI/CD transition. Having come from another company that had started their CI/CD journey many years ago, I didnt find antyhing new breakthroughs in this book. Some of the studies were interesting in it allows you to group or profile teams in to categories, but from a technology point of view it was very lacking.
2 people found this helpful
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The bible of modern SaaS delivery

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.
1 people found this helpful