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

by Nicole Forsgren

A successful measure of performance should have two key characteristics. First, it should focus on a global outcome to ensure teams aren’t pitted against each other.

our measure should focus on outcomes not output: it shouldn’t reward people for putting in large amounts of busywork that doesn’t actually help achieve organizational goals.

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.

Product Design and Development Product Delivery (Build, Testing, Deployment) Create new products and services that solve customer problems using hypothesis-driven delivery, modern UX, design thinking. Enable fast flow from development to production and reliable releases by standardizing work, and reducing variability and batch sizes. Feature design and implementation may require work that has never been performed before. Integration, test, and deployment must be performed continuously as quickly as possible. Estimates are highly uncertain. Cycle times should be well-known and predictable. Outcomes are highly variable. Outcomes should have low variability.

We should emphasize that bureaucracy is not necessarily bad. As Mark Schwartz points out in The Art of Business Value, the goal of bureaucracy is to “ensure fairness by applying rules to administrative behavior. The rules would be the same for all cases—no one would receive preferential or discriminatory treatment. Not only that, but the rules would represent the best products of the accumulated knowledge of the organization: Formulated by bureaucrats who were experts in their fields, the rules would impose efficient structures and processes while guaranteeing fairness and eliminating arbitrariness” (Schwartz 2016, p. 56).

Westrum’s theory posits that organizations with better information flow function more effectively.

“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place”

the tribe lead also regularly visits the squads to ask questions—not the traditional questions like “Why isn’t this getting done?” but, rather, “Help me better understand the problems you’re encountering,” “Help me see what you’re learning,” and “What can I do to better support you and the team?”

Technical practices predict continuous delivery, Westrum organizational culture, identity, job satisfaction, software delivery performance, less burnout, less deployment pain, and less time spent on rework.

A loosely coupled, well-encapsulated architecture drives IT performance. In the 2017 dataset, this was the biggest contributor to continuous delivery.

Teams that reported no approval process or used peer review achieved higher software delivery performance. A lightweight change approval process predicts software delivery performance.

High-performing teams reported having leaders with the strongest behaviors across all dimensions: vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition.

Leadership is predictive of Lean product development capabilities (working in small batches, team experimentation, gathering and implementing customer feedback) and technical practices (test automation, deployment automation, trunk-based development, shift left on security, loosely coupled architecture, empowered teams, continuous integration).