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

by Nicole Forsgren

They describe how effective IT delivery organizations take about an hour to get code from “committed to mainline” to “running in production,” a journey lesser organizations take months to do.

Their evidence refutes the bimodal IT notion that you have to choose between speed and stability—instead, speed depends on stability, so good IT practices give you both.

It takes discipline, persistence, transformational leadership, and a focus on people.

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

Queue theory in math tells us that as utilization approaches 100%, lead times approach infinity—in other words, once you get to very high levels of utilization, it takes teams exponentially longer to get anything done.

Lead time is the time it takes to go from a customer making a request to the request being satisfied.

As Deming said, ’whenever there is fear, you get the wrong numbers’”