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

by Nicole Forsgren

strategic use of technology explains revenue and productivity gains more than mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and entrepreneurship (2017).

The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities—not on maturity.

none of the following often-cited factors predicted performance: age and technology used for the application (for example, mainframe “systems of record” vs. greenfield “systems of engagement”) whether operations teams or development teams performed deployments whether a change approval board (CAB) is implemented

“what my . . . experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave—what they do” (Shook 2010).

Teams that did well had fewer than three active branches at any time, their branches had very short lifetimes (less than a day) before being merged into trunk and never had “code freeze” or stabilization periods.

Those who agreed with the following statements were more likely to be in the high-performing group: 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.