Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

Author: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim Year: 2018 Genre: DevOps

About This Book

Accelerate distils years of rigorous research into what actually drives high software delivery performance and better organisational outcomes. It identifies the key metrics that matter and the technical and cultural practices that predictably improve them.

Key Insights

• Four key metrics: Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change fail rate, and mean time to recovery quantify delivery performance.
• Technical practices that move the needle: Continuous integration/delivery, trunk‑based development, test automation, small batches, and versioning everything.
• Architect for autonomy: Loosely coupled systems and teams reduce coordination cost and increase throughput.
• Culture matters: Generative (high‑trust, learning) cultures outperform. Psychological safety and blameless post‑mortems enable improvement.
• Lean product flow: Limit WIP, shorten feedback loops, and use value stream thinking to remove bottlenecks.
• Use cloud like cloud: On‑demand self‑service platforms (internal or public) correlate with better outcomes when used with essential characteristics.
• Evidence over folklore: The results are statistically grounded, separating correlation from spurious claims.

Why I Recommend It

It’s the most evidence‑based guide to improving software delivery I know. The research gives leaders and engineers a shared language (the four metrics) and a practical playbook for better speed, stability, and business results.

If you’re modernising delivery, this book will help you focus on behaviours and architectures that demonstrably work.