3 minute read

Preamble

Published in 2018, “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology” by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim quickly became the bestseller among IT Leadership & Management alike.

It could not pass my attention either as i am always ready to get more clarifications and guidance on DevOps Methodology practical application.

At the end of the day the title had a “The Science of .. DevOps” excerpt, right? :wink:

Into “Accelerate” Book

General Overview

Briefly, “Accelerate” covers very interesing topics, for example:

  • Westrum’s typology of organizational cultures
  • eNPS (eNPS Employee Net Promoter Score)
  • Fighting People’s Burnouts
  • Defining Managers, Leaders and Leadership and their roles
  • Transformational Leadership characteristics

and many-many more “here and there” valuable takeaways, all backed up by research they did/used while writing the Book.

“Accelerate”, Part III: “Transformation”

“Accelerate” has also an “Ace in the Sleeve” - 3rd part of the book: “Transformation”, my personal favourite.

Simply put: how do you actually shift from current state of things in your Org to a proposed one: among numerous methods you can find well-known “Spotify Organizational Structure” and a very handy “Team, Management & Leadership practices” Martix (Figure 16.4: High-Performance Team, Management, and Leadership Behaviors and Practices).

However, from engineering standpoint, pretty much nothing changed to “Three Ways”.

Moreover, i find peculiar the fact, that while the technical practices in “Accelerate” Book remained if not identical, than pretty much the same in comparison to “DevOps Handbook”, i have failed to find any mentions of the “Three Ways” despite that 2 authors of “Handbook” were participating in creating “Accelerate”.

DevOps Principles Cheatsheet: “Accelerate”

Nonetheless, 2 valuable additions to “the Flow” and “the Learning” principles were discovered, namely:

and this is how they align on DevOps Principles schema (new marked with yellow circles):

Conclusion

To sum up, in my humble opinion “Accelerate” is designed for Managers & Leadership of all levels in a first place…which might discourage some engineers from reading it. By ALL means please don’t!

As reading it from cover to cover, will grant you the least minumum - the knowledge of what to expect from Management and in best case scenario - you, my friend, the DevOps Engineer, will start shifting from simply Using tools & Applying practices to a much more meaninful Establishing DevOps Methodology, completely aligned with Higher Command :wink:

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