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

by Nicole Forsgren

Encourage teams to organize internal “yak days,” where teams get together to work on technical debt. These are great events because technical debt is so rarely prioritized.

Our research shows that three things are highly correlated with software delivery performance and contribute to a strong team culture: cross-functional collaboration, a climate for learning, and tools.

Actively seeking, encouraging, and rewarding work that facilitates collaboration. Make sure success is reproducible and pay attention to latent factors that make collaboration easier.

applying principles and practices through a method-agnostic approach, drawing on a variety of practices—DevOps, Agile, Scrum, kanban, Lean startup, Kata, Obeya, strategy deployment, and others—

Four distinct zones are visualized: strategic improvement, performance monitoring, portfolio roadmap, and leadership actions, each with current information about targets, gaps, progress, and problems.

sized according to Bezos’ Two Pizza Rule—no team can be so large that it would require more than two pizzas to feed them.

Most squads are cross-functional, consisting of engineers and marketers, collaborating as a single team with a shared understanding of customer value. At ING, this team composition is referred to as BizDevOps.

There are also chapters, comprised of members of the same discipline (for example, the Data Analytics Chapter), who are matrixed across squads and bring specialized knowledge to promote learning and advancement among squad members. And finally, there are centers of expertise, bringing together individuals with particular capabilities (for example, communications or enterprise architects

In addition to regular stand-ups with squads, product owners, IT-area leads, and chapter leads, the tribe lead also regularly visits the squads to ask questions

The third objective—develop the people—is especially important in a technology domain, where automation is disrupting many technology jobs. For people to bring their best to the work that may, in fact, eliminate their current job, they need complete faith that their leaders value them—not just for their present work but for their ability to improve and innovate in their work.