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Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by [Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim]

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Jez Humble

Gene Kim

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

by Nicole Forsgren PhD (Author), Jez Humble (Author), Gene Kim (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

Print length

289 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

IT Revolution Press
Publication date

March 27, 2018
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8594 KB
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Popular Highlights in this book

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In our search for measures of delivery performance that meet these criteria, we settled on four: delivery lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change fail rate.
Highlighted by 4,117 Kindle readers
The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities—not on maturity.
Highlighted by 3,590 Kindle readers
Lead time is the time it takes to go from a customer making a request to the request being satisfied.
Highlighted by 3,555 Kindle readers
Second, our measure should focus on outcomes not output: it shouldn’t reward people for putting in large amounts of busywork that doesn’t actually help achieve organizational goals.
Highlighted by 3,454 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

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.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

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 --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07B9F83WM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ IT Revolution Press; 1st edition (March 27, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 27, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8594 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 289 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #43,974 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4 in Software Development (Kindle Store)
- #6 in Business Production & Operations
- #18 in Computers & Technology (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
(4.4) 2,752 ratings

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Jez Humble
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Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software including Shingo Publication Award winner Accelerate, The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Jolt Award winner Continuous Delivery. He has spent his 20 year career in software tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, including working for the US Federal Government’s 18F team as part of the Obama Tech Surge, and co-founding startup DevOps Research and Assessment LLC, which was acquired by Google in December 2018. He works for Google as a site reliability engineer, and teaches classes on agile software engineering and product management at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
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Gene Kim
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Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40” list, and he was named a Computer Science Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.
He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and family.
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Nicole Forsgren PhD
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Nicole is an IT impacts expert who is best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. In a previous life, she was a professor, sysadmin, and hardware performance analyst. Nicole has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and her work has been featured in various media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. She holds a PhD in management information systems and a master’s degree in accounting. Nicole is CEO and Chief Scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA).
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

2,752 global ratings

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4 star		23%
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Evidence modern development practices pay off?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 27, 2020

Verified Purchase

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

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Amazon Customer

A Leadership must read for transforming the 2023 organization

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2022

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The book opens with 2 sections on best practices and observations from other real world organizations, and concludes with a section on what leadership must do to execute by looking at the ING organization

One person found this helpful

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Scott J Pearson

The foundation in research of the DevOps movement

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 20, 2021

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DevOps, roughly speaking, seeks to get IT workers to interact with each other more – particularly when they are in different functional roles. Authors Humble and Kim have led this movement and pioneered annual studies to ascertain its progress among practitioners of technology. In this book, they team together with Forsgren (a PhD who brings a rigorous knowledge of statistics and data collection to the table) to present their findings and explain their methods.

IT professionals are notorious for trusting what a computer says over what their fellow humans say – even when the computational figures can be shown as inaccurate. They tend to distrust “subjective” surveys (even the most rigorous) over “objective” data sources. In this work, Forsgren runs head-first against that prevailing wind to sail cleanly into the harbor of first-rate technology organizations.

In this work, these three authors share what to look for in high-performing organizations with technology centers. They distinguish those from characteristics of other clusters with mid-level or low performance. In an ever-changing, competitive tech environment, these findings, grounded in rigorous data collection and analysis, shine a light onto what to aspire towards in an IT group. Reading them can save needless experimentation as it confirms employees’ collective instincts as to the path forward.

Information technology is now central to our lives in modern societies. Thus, it is important to just about every major corporation (i.e., a “vertical”). Those who manage, work in, or interface with technology sectors can benefit from learning what a healthy tech workforce looks like. That is this book’s main audience. Researchers about, teachers of, and students in computer science serve as another market as these groups learn about what modern workplaces look like in the “real world.”

I’ve been a fan of the DevOps movement for a while now. I’ve worked in environments (academic research labs) that practice DevOps principles since 2001… well before the movement became organized. The ability to wear many hats and think through various functions just seems beneficial towards producing high-quality software. In recent years, Kim and Humble have articulated the foundations of this movement. In this book, Forsgren’s addition of grounding their theories in rigorous data analysis is welcomed and serves to transform the tech industry even further.

Helpful

Do not know why they are requiring a pen name

Tells you some of what you need to know

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

The good:

Change Approval Boards are statistically useless. The team making the change knows better. (If we believe the analysis.)

Latent Measures in Surveys are important

You cannot buy some other company's process and drop it in.

You will have to experiment for yourselves.

Definitions of Low, Medium, High performing teams.

Problems with Surveys in DevOps occur when subjects think they will loose jobs over making processes more automated. (Believes anonymous feedback helps this -- doesn't get into any examples of getting one's lunch eaten.)

The Bad

The data is not public. It is just their word. Though, there is a great air of believability about the findings. In other words, this is not an open peer-reviewed paper, but, trying to pull intelligence out but keep the data hidden. This is the main reason I have marked four out of five stars.

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Gerald Dunn

If you want an introduction to DevOps....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

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 craft
3. 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.

5 people found this helpful

C72839

Good practices bought together but nothing revolutionary

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

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.

12 people found this helpful

Mr Terry Cleary

Basic and padded overviews

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

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.

16 people found this helpful

E. Gopalakrishnan

Excellent research

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 31, 2022

Verified Purchase

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.

2 people found this helpful

Kevin Gough

Essential reading for anyone involved in software development.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

An easily digestible summary of the huge amount of research carried out by Forsgren et al. If you are involved in the leadership of software development teams this will arm you with the evidence that you need to understand how and where you can help them improve. Inspirational and convincing, while there may be nothing new here for those who are already on a devops journey, it is a compelling summary of why that journey is important.

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