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

by Nicole Forsgren

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.

A key goal of continuous delivery is changing the economics of the software delivery process so the cost of pushing out individual changes is very low.

The most important characteristic of high-performing teams is that they are never satisfied: they always strive to get better. High performers make improvement part of everybody’s daily work.

Continuous delivery requires that developers and testers, as well as UX, product, and operations people, collaborate effectively throughout the delivery process.

It’s interesting to note that having automated tests primarily created and maintained either by QA or an outsourced party is not correlated with IT performance.

We can do most of our testing without requiring an integrated environment.1 We can and do deploy or release our application independently of other applications/services it depends on.

WIP limits are no good if they don’t lead to improvements that increase flow.

In fact, our measure of job satisfaction looks at a few key things: if you are satisfied in your work, if you are given the tools and resources to do your work, and if your job makes good use of your skills and abilities. It’s important to call these out, because taken together, this is what makes job satisfaction so impactful.

Our research found that this second construct, proactive failure notification, is a technical capability that is predictive of software delivery performance.

It takes real effort, with coaching, mentoring, and modeling (mentoring is being piloted within the Omnichannel Tribe, with plans for expansion) to change behavior from the traditional command-and-control to leaders-as-coaches where everyone’s job is to (1) do the work, (2) improve the work, and (3) develop the people.

We believe the better questions to ask are: How do we learn how to learn? How do I learn? How can I make it safe for others to learn? How can I learn from and with them? How do we, together, establish new behaviors and new ways of thinking that build new habits, that cultivate our new culture? And where do we start?

Remember: you can’t buy or copy high performance. You will need to develop your own capabilities as you pursue a path that fits your particular context and goals. This will take sustained effort, investment, focus, and time. However, our research is unequivocal. The results are worth it.