Friday, October 16, 2020

Accelerate by N Forsgren, J Humble, G Kim







I was a little skeptical when I started reading this book, especially after reading Martin Fowler's lukewarm recommendation in the preface.  Surveys and correlations sounded much too soft for my "scientific method" & objective evidence approach to understanding phenomena.  However the authors did win me over in the second half of the book by explaining in detail how psychographics has evolved to become a hard, predictive science.  So I do recommend reading it in detail and referring to the prescriptive advice.

The fluff in the beginning is why we should care, the importance of culture, and the need for better practices.  Then the book goes into the most-important measurements, including deployment frequency, lead times, recovery (roll-back) times, and time between failures -- the normal duty cycle of machines we know and use from the 19th century.

The next few chapters go into measuring and nudging culture and technical patterns and practices. What I love about the measurements and practices is that they force teams to minimize the waste of antipattern practices such as tickets, manual work, manual testing, and monolithic security / compliance / ops organizations -- the developer experience becomes much better and the obvious bottlenecks become more pronounced to leaders.

Then the book talks about sustainable work (preventing burn out), employee satisfaction, team identity, engagement, leadership, coaching, and management.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it.  5/5 Stars.

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