Book review - Accelerate by Nibole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

Lean methodologies, DevOps, small cycles, CI/CD, no overtime, freedom, quality, culture, sustainable work… cool stuff. A lot of people talk about them in positive terms but Nicole Forsgrem, Jez Humble and Gene Kim decided to go one step further: demonstrate that these things work.

To do this they dedicated 4 years of investigation to find what capabilities and practices are important to accelerate the software development and delivery. 23,000 responses to surveys from around 2,000 organizations, from startups to large companies.

It is the only solid research I’ve found on this topic (if you know of another, I’d love to read it), and this book shows the results. Essential.

Highlighted quotes

Rather than providing a summary of the book, which may be biased or influenced by my personal opinions or writing style, I prefer to spotlight select phrases from the text that I found particularly inspiring.

I read the Spanish version, so these quotes can be a bit different in the English version.

👉 Our research shows that none of these factors is associated with improved software delivery performance: age and technology used for the application, whether development or operations teams were doing the deployments, whether there is a CAB (change approval board)

👉 Ideally, developers should be rewarded for solving problems with as little code as possible. It would even be better if we could solve problems without writing code or even deleting it

👉 Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions

👉 Continuous delivery technical practices have a huge impact on performance, quality, and help improve culture and reduce deployment burnout and pain

👉 We found that high performance is possible with all kinds of systems, as long as those systems are loosely coupled

👉 Forcing engineers to use tools and frameworks from the “approved list” prevents teams from choosing technologies that would be more suitable and experimenting with new approaches and paradigms to solve their problems

👉 We found that where deployments cause the most pain we find the poorest culture, organizational performance, and software delivery performance

👉 Research shows that stressful jobs can be just as bad for physical health as passive smoking and obesity

👉 Teams with more diversity in terms of gender or underrepresented minorities are smarter, achieve better team performance, and obtain better business results.

👉 The most valuable work a leader can do is cultivate and support a strong organizational culture among those they serve: their teams.