Recent Reading - January 2021
I am attempting to record more short synposes of the books I read. These are entirely for me own sake, as reflecting on my list of books I have read, there are some that I have nearly no recollection of even reading.
In January 2021 I read:
- Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim.
Accelerate
Accelerate is effectively a report on the research done via the State of DevOps survey from 2013 to 2017 or so.
The first half of the book explains their findings, and the last half explains their methods.
The bottom line is that the survey followed > 2000 engineering organizations over multiple years on more than 150 dimensions, and as such does allow the authors to actually determine what factors were predictive of organizational success.
A few surprises or aha moments:
There were only four significant predictors - deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.
It is surprising what were not predictors - specifically, whether the software being worked on was greenfield or legacy, whether it was deployed to cloud, mainframe, or on-prem, etc.
I will shortly be reading The Unicorn Project with a book club which should prove enlightening, though I expect it to be largely the same message as The Phoenix Project and the other Goldratt books.