The last book campaign was on “The Phoenix Project,” which is an easy-to-read story about a fictional company’s transformation into the world of DevOps. “Accelerate” is nothing like that, and if you’re a sucker for raw data like I am, then you may enjoy it more.

“Accelerate” details the results of a multi-year study analyzing company’s software development and delivery processes that categorizes them into low, medium and high performers. My goal here is to provide a general view into the book without ruining too much of the fun to see if it’s up your alley.

A question that immediately comes up is as follows: what defines software delivery performance?

Three key indicators were found to positively correlate organization performance, which is defined by an organization’s profitability, market share and productivity. The three indicators were deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and mean time to repair (MTTR).

High performers in 2017 deployed on demand multiple times per day, had less than an hour lead time for changes, and had a MTTR of under an hour compared to low performers’ rate of one deployment a month, a lead time of upwards of a month, and less than a day for MTTR.

We can see that the DevOps processes help organization performance, but the transformation from a low performer to a high performer is much more than just having the right software delivery methodology. Culture also plays a big role, and one of “Accelerate’s” goals was to find a module of culture that was well-defined, can be measured effectively, and would have predictive power.

The book settled on the Westrum model, which predicted that a good culture requires trust and cooperation throughout the organization. Under the Westrum model, these factors lead into higher quality transparent decision-making. When these two conditions are the (Read more...)