A day in Payments

Accelerate is a book about DevOps and how its practices can improve the performance of Software Delivery in an organization, but unlike most of the books out there, its audience is not engineers but managers and leaders. Evaluating performance is quite a complex topic and there is an abundance of publications on the best techniques and practices, but evaluating the relative performance between organizations is an even more complex objective. This is the first book that falls in my hands where there is such an attempt.

The authors propose 24 capabilities with a direct impact on the performance of organizations, and proceed to prove statistically their correlation.

The capabilities are:

• Continuous Delivery:
  • Version control for code, infrastructure and configuration.
  • Deployment automation.
  • Continuous integration.
  • Trunk-based development.
  • Test automation.
  • Test data management.
  • Early integration of security mechanisms in the development process.
  • Continuous delivery.
• Architecture:
  • Loosely coupled architecture.
  • Empowered teams, to choose tools, technology, frameworks, …
• Product and process:
  • Early and continuous customer feedback.
  • Visibility of work through the value stream.
  • Working in small batches.
  • Foster team experimentation.
• Lean management and monitoring:
  • Lightweight change approval process.
  • Monitoring across application and infrastructure.
  • Proactive notification of issues.
  • WIP limits.
  • Visualizing work.
• Cultural:
  • Generative culture, as described by Westrum.
  • Support learning.
  • Foster collaboration among teams.
  • Meaningful work as a driver to job satisfaction.
  • Transformational leadership.

Complementing the materials presented in the book, there is a chapter dedicated to the methodologies used by ING to organize work and teams. I found this glimpse at how another company in finance, a highly regulated environment, deals with complexity very interesting and stimulating, and one of those readings that help me introspect on my foundations as a manager and leader.

From my perspective, the authors exercise an extreme focus to prove statistically the relation between high performance and these capabilities, to the point that it shadows what I think it is the key outcome of the book: the definition of a DevOps framework that targets the leaders of an organization. At the end, the core idea of the DevOps movement is the elimination of those walls that hinder the development of products, and as such it requires the inclusion of all participants, be it engineers, product managers or leaders.

There are several scenarios in which I would recommend this book:

• to leaders and managers that are looking for a tool-set to evaluate the organization and teams they work for; or assessing their strengths and weaknesses.
• to any employee trying to bring change in organizations that didn’t jump yet to the DevOps and Lean movements, as it gives information and techniques that can help showcase the need.
• to practitioners that have lost the focus and goals that drove them to DevOps and Lean and want to return back to their origins.

And to close the review, I would like to use a sentence from the book that hit me directly in my heart:

As a leader, you have to look at your own behaviors before you ask others to change.

---

• ← Previous Post
• Next Post →