The DevOps Handbook Quotes

“Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood. This”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Our goal with a product-based funding model is to value the achievement of organizational and customer outcomes, such as revenue, customer lifetime value, or customer adoption rate, ideally with the minimum of output (e.g., amount of effort or time, lines of code). Contrast this to how projects are typically measured, such as whether it was completed within the promised budget, time, and scope.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“When every team expedites their work, the net result is that every project ends up moving at the same slow crawl.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“By doing this, Development and Operations may end up creating a shared work queue, instead of each silo using a different one (e.g., Development uses JIRA while Operations uses ServiceNow). A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams that think they can get away with much less than 20%.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.” If”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Stop starting. Start finishing.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“high performers use a disciplined approach to solving problems. This is in contrast to the more common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can we convince everyone else that we didn’t cause the outage. When there is a culture of blame around outages and problems, groups may avoid documenting changes and displaying telemetry where everyone can see them to avoid being blamed for outages.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“For example, high performance with a functional-oriented and centralized Operations group is possible, as long as service teams get what they need from Operations reliably and quickly (ideally on demand) and vice-versa. Many”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“This kind of service-oriented architecture allows small teams to work on smaller and simpler units of development that each team can deploy independently, quickly, and safely. Shoup notes, “Organizations with these types of architectures, such as Google and Amazon, show how it can impact organizational structures, [creating] flexibility and scalability. These are both organizations with tens of thousands of developers, where small teams can still be incredibly productive.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“how we design our organization dictates how work is performed, and, therefore, the outcomes we achieve. Throughout”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Done poorly, Conway’s Law will prevent teams from working safely and independently; instead, they will be tightly-coupled together, all waiting on each other for work to be done, with even small changes creating potentially global, catastrophic consequences.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“how we organize our teams has a powerful effect on the software we produce, as well as our resulting architectural and production outcomes. In”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps isn’t about automation, just as astronomy isn’t about telescopes.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“in our”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.”§”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Because our goal is to enable small teams of developers to independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers quickly and reliably, this is where we want our constraint to be. High performers, regardless of whether an engineer is in Development, QA, Ops, or Infosec, state that their goal is to help maximize developer productivity.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations