Book Summary: Accelerate

Building, and scaling high performing technology organizations

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Accelerate has consistently been described as one of the best books when it comes to DevOps and building technical agility in organizations. I finally got around to reading it and it was every bit as good as I had expected it to be.

The book is essentially the presentation of a multi-year research and contains a whole section on why certain research methods were chosen over others. I have been reading and writing a fair bit about agility and moving fast, so most of the things in the book were not new, but the solid research backing it means that “CI/CD is a must-have” is not just an opinion anymore. The authors have shown it to be a demonstrable trait of successful teams in the wider industry.

Accelerate is a short-ish read, but it is dense with information. I am sharing my highlights from it below so that you can get a taste of what the book is like. If you like these semi-organized snippets, you should definitely read the book.

Preface

improvements in software delivery are possible for every team and in every company, as long as leadership provides consistent support — including time, actions, and resources — demonstrating a true commitment to improvement, and as long as team members commit themselves to the work.

Chapter 1 – Accelerate

1. Small teams that work in short cycles and measure feedback from users to build products and services that delight their customers and rapidly deliver value to their organizations.
2. DevOps emerged from a small number of organizations facing a wicked problem: how to build secure, resilient, rapidly evolving distributed systems at scale.
3. The Forrester report states that DevOps is accelerating technology, but that organizations often overestimate their progress (Klavens et al. 2017). Furthermore, the report points out that executives are especially prone to overestimating their progress when compared to those who are actually doing the work.
4. The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities — not on maturity.