Nicole Forsgren

We can now assert with confidence that high IT performance correlates with strong business performance, helping to boost productivity, profitability, and market share.

The organizations that thrive in the future will be those that leverage digital technologies to improve their offerings and operations.

Their work illustrates how DevOps can improve the state of the art in organizational design, software development culture, and systems architecture.

These surveys, and the careful analysis done on them, provide some of the best justification around for practices that can significantly improve most IT organizations.

Don’t ignore the science outlined in this book. It will help you accelerate your transformation to a high- performing technology organization.

Software delivery is an exercise in continuous improvement, and our research shows that year over year the best keep getting better, and those who fail to improve fall further and further behind.

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.

Software and technology are key differentiators for organizations to deliver value to customers and stakeholders.

The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities—not on maturity.

High performers understand that they don’t have to trade speed for stability or vice versa, because by building quality in they get both.

Clearly, what was state of the art three years ago is just not good enough for today’s business environment.

Our research doesn’t conclusively explain this, but we have a few ideas about why this might be the case.

This demonstrates that your organization’s software delivery capability can in fact provide a competitive advantage to your business.

Whatever the mission, how a technology organization performs can predict overall organizational performance.

The fact that software delivery performance matters provides a strong argument against outsourcing the development of software that is strategic to your business, and instead bringing this capability into the core of your organization.

Our ability to measure and reason about practices, culture, and outcomes is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to great positive effect in the pursuit of ever higher performance.

Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

The way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave—what they do.

Continuous delivery is a set of capabilities that enable us to get changes of all kinds—features, configuration changes, bug fixes, experiments—into production or into the hands of users safely, quickly, and sustainably.

The most important characteristic of high-performing teams is that they are never satisfied: they always strive to get better.

Once you have these automated tests, our analysis shows it’s important to run them regularly. Every commit should trigger a build of the software and running a set of fast, automated tests.

Our research shows that the technical practices of continuous delivery have a huge impact on many aspects of an organization. Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality, and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain.

We discovered that low performers were more likely to say that the software they were building—or the set of services they had to interact with —was custom software developed by another company.

Our research shows that these are wrong questions to focus on. What tools or technologies you use is irrelevant if the people who must use them hate using them, or if they don’t achieve the outcomes and enable the behaviors we care about.

Our research shows that building security into software development not only improves delivery performance but also improves security quality. Organizations with high delivery performance spend significantly less time remediating security issues.

When building security into software is part of the daily work of developers, and when infosec teams provide tools, training, and support to make it easy for developers to do the right thing, delivery performance gets better.

I am rugged and, more importantly, my code is rugged. I recognize that software has become a foundation of our modern world. I recognize the awesome responsibility that comes with this foundational role." - Corman et al. 2012

The key to working in small batches is to have work decomposed into features that allow for rapid development, instead of complex features developed on branches and released infrequently.

One of the points of Agile development is to seek input from customers throughout the development process, including early stages. This allows the development team to gather important information, which then informs the next stages of development.

By aligning organizational values with individual values, employee burnout can be reduced. Imagine the effects on employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. The potential value to organizations and the economy is staggering.

Our research found that improving technical practices (such as those that contribute to continuous delivery) and Lean practices (such as those in Lean management and Lean product management) reduce feelings of burnout among our survey respondents.

Our research found that employees in high- performing organizations were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work, and other studies have also shown that this is correlated with better business outcomes.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you.

Leaders have the authority and budget to make the large-scale changes that are often needed, to provide air cover when a transformation is underway, and to change the incentives of entire groups of technical professionals.

Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change.

Research shows that teams with more diversity with regard to gender or underrepresented minorities are smarter, achieve better team performance, and achieve better business outcomes.

Employee engagement is not just a feel-good metric—it drives business outcomes.

High-performing teams reported having leaders with the strongest behaviors across all dimensions: vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition.

Transformational leadership enables the practices that correlate with high performance, and it also supports effective communication and collaboration between team members in pursuit of organizational goals.

Managers, in particular, play a critical role in connecting the strategic objectives of the business to the work their teams do.

Managers can do a lot to improve their team’s performance by creating a work environment where employees feel safe, investing in developing the capabilities of their people, and removing obstacles to work.

Knowledge is power, and you should give power to those who have the knowledge.

Exploratory analyses are a fun and exciting part of the research process. For those who are divergent thinkers, this is often the stage where new ideas, new hypotheses, and new research projects are generated and proposed.

Many people have heard the phrase “correlation doesn’t imply causation,” but what does that mean? The analyses done in the exploratory stage include correlation but not causation.

The more evidence we find to support a hypothesis, the more confidence we have for it. This process also helps to avoid the dangers that come from fishing for data—finding the spurious correlations that might randomly exist but have no real reason or explanation beyond chance.

A latent construct is a way of measuring something that can’t be measured directly. We can ask for the temperature of a room or the response time of a website—these things we can measure directly. A good example of something that can’t be measured directly is organizational culture.

By using latent constructs, we can ask one question for each aspect of the underlying idea. If we define the construct and write the items well, it works, conceptually, like a Venn diagram, with each survey question capturing a related aspect of the underlying concept.

Latent constructs that are periodically retested with statistics and exhibit good psychometric properties help us safeguard against rogue data.

Taking time to do periodic assessments that include the perceptions of the technologists that make and deliver your technology can uncover key insights into the bottlenecks and constraints in your system.

If you ignore the perceptions and experience of the professionals working on your systems entirely, you lose an important view into your systems.

Objective data is not influenced by feelings or emotions; in contrast, subjective data captures one’s perceptions or feelings about a situation.

If we want to understand how people feel about taking risks, sharing information, and communicating across boundaries, we have to ask them.

Our research design—a cross-sectional data collection for four years—recruited professionals and organizations familiar with the word DevOps.

Leadership really does have a powerful impact on results. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products.

We are in the midst of a complete transformation in the way value is created, delivered, and consumed.

You have to understand why, not just copy the behaviors," says Jannes Smit, IT Manager of Internet Banking and Omnichannel at ING Netherlands.

As a leader, you have to look at your own behaviors before you ask others to change," says Jannes Smit.

Before, I never discussed culture," he said. "It was a difficult topic and I did not know how to change it in a sustainable way. But I learned that when you change the way you work, you change the routines, you create a different culture.

Make it your own. This means three things: Don’t look to copy other enterprises on their methods and practices, or to implement an expert-designed model. Study and learn from them, but then experiment and adapt to what works for you and your culture.

Your current way of work took decades to entrench. It’s going to take time to change actions and thought patterns until they become new habits and, eventually, your new culture.

You just have to try it: learn, succeed, fail, learn, adjust, repeat. Rhythm and routine, rhythm and routine, rhythm and routine . . .

Remember: you can’t buy or copy high performance. You will need to develop your own capabilities as you pursue a path that fits your particular context and goals.

Transformational leadership supports and amplifies the technical and process work that is so essential in DevOps. It is comprised of five factors: vision, intellectual stimulation, inspirational communication, supportive leadership, and personal recognition.

High performers have the shortest integration times and branch lifetimes, with branch life and integration typically lasting hours –or a day.

A loosely coupled, well-encapsulated architecture drives IT performance.

Investment in DevOps was highly correlated to software delivery performance.

A very special thank you goes to my dad for instilling in me a sense of curiosity, a need for excellence, and an inability to take sh*t from people who don’t think I can do something.

Your support, encouragement, and wisdom—in life and in tech—have been invaluable.

Continuous delivery (CD) capabilities are correlated with delivery performance, deployment frequency, empowered teams, Lean product management, loosely coupled architecture, and organizational culture.

Lean management impacts organizational culture and reduces burnout.

Leadership is correlated with continuous integration, delivery performance, empowered teams, feedback, loosely coupled architecture, shift left on security, test automation, and working in small batches.

Diversity in teams is correlated with organizational performance.

Poor organizational culture is negatively correlated with burnout and deployment pain.

We use latent constructs and write our survey measures carefully and thoughtfully, avoiding the use of any propaganda items; we perform several statistical tests to confirm that our measures meet psychometric standards for validity and reliability; and we have a large dataset that pulls respondents from around the world, which serves as a safeguard against errors or bad actors.

It is through improving our ability to deliver software that organizations can deliver features faster, pivot when needed, respond to compliance and security changes, and take advantage of fast feedback to attract new customers and delight existing ones.

High performers do better at all of these measures. This is precisely what the Agile and Lean movements predict, but much dogma in our industry still rests on the false assumption that moving faster means trading off against other performance goals, rather than enabling and reinforcing them.

We found that where code deployments are most painful, you’ll find the poorest software delivery performance, organizational performance, and culture.

Burnout is physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion caused by overwork or stress—but it is more than just being overworked or stressed. Burnout can make the things we once loved about our work and life seem insignificant and dull.

All respondents are now working from the same items, the same words, and the same definitions. It doesn’t matter what they call it at their organization—it matters what they have been asked in the survey.

In our search for measures of delivery performance that meet these criteria, we settled on four: delivery lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change fail rate.

We can now assert with confidence that high IT performance correlates with strong business performance, helping to boost productivity, profitability, and market share.

The organizations that thrive in the future will be those that leverage digital technologies to improve their offerings and operations.

Their work illustrates how DevOps can improve the state of the art in organizational design, software development culture, and systems architecture.

These surveys, and the careful analysis done on them, provide some of the best justification around for practices that can significantly improve most IT organizations.

Don’t ignore the science outlined in this book. It will help you accelerate your transformation to a high- performing technology organization.

Software delivery is an exercise in continuous improvement, and our research shows that year over year the best keep getting better, and those who fail to improve fall further and further behind.

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.

Software and technology are key differentiators for organizations to deliver value to customers and stakeholders.

The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities—not on maturity.

High performers understand that they don’t have to trade speed for stability or vice versa, because by building quality in they get both.

Clearly, what was state of the art three years ago is just not good enough for today’s business environment.

Our research doesn’t conclusively explain this, but we have a few ideas about why this might be the case.

This demonstrates that your organization’s software delivery capability can in fact provide a competitive advantage to your business.

Whatever the mission, how a technology organization performs can predict overall organizational performance.

The fact that software delivery performance matters provides a strong argument against outsourcing the development of software that is strategic to your business, and instead bringing this capability into the core of your organization.

Our ability to measure and reason about practices, culture, and outcomes is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to great positive effect in the pursuit of ever higher performance.

Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

The way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave—what they do.

Continuous delivery is a set of capabilities that enable us to get changes of all kinds—features, configuration changes, bug fixes, experiments—into production or into the hands of users safely, quickly, and sustainably.

The most important characteristic of high-performing teams is that they are never satisfied: they always strive to get better.

Once you have these automated tests, our analysis shows it’s important to run them regularly. Every commit should trigger a build of the software and running a set of fast, automated tests.

Our research shows that the technical practices of continuous delivery have a huge impact on many aspects of an organization. Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality, and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain.

We discovered that low performers were more likely to say that the software they were building—or the set of services they had to interact with —was custom software developed by another company.

Our research shows that these are wrong questions to focus on. What tools or technologies you use is irrelevant if the people who must use them hate using them, or if they don’t achieve the outcomes and enable the behaviors we care about.

Our research shows that building security into software development not only improves delivery performance but also improves security quality. Organizations with high delivery performance spend significantly less time remediating security issues.

When building security into software is part of the daily work of developers, and when infosec teams provide tools, training, and support to make it easy for developers to do the right thing, delivery performance gets better.

I am rugged and, more importantly, my code is rugged. I recognize that software has become a foundation of our modern world. I recognize the awesome responsibility that comes with this foundational role." - Corman et al. 2012

The key to working in small batches is to have work decomposed into features that allow for rapid development, instead of complex features developed on branches and released infrequently.

One of the points of Agile development is to seek input from customers throughout the development process, including early stages. This allows the development team to gather important information, which then informs the next stages of development.

By aligning organizational values with individual values, employee burnout can be reduced. Imagine the effects on employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. The potential value to organizations and the economy is staggering.

Our research found that improving technical practices (such as those that contribute to continuous delivery) and Lean practices (such as those in Lean management and Lean product management) reduce feelings of burnout among our survey respondents.

Our research found that employees in high- performing organizations were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work, and other studies have also shown that this is correlated with better business outcomes.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you.

Leaders have the authority and budget to make the large-scale changes that are often needed, to provide air cover when a transformation is underway, and to change the incentives of entire groups of technical professionals.

Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change.

Research shows that teams with more diversity with regard to gender or underrepresented minorities are smarter, achieve better team performance, and achieve better business outcomes.

Employee engagement is not just a feel-good metric—it drives business outcomes.

High-performing teams reported having leaders with the strongest behaviors across all dimensions: vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition.

Transformational leadership enables the practices that correlate with high performance, and it also supports effective communication and collaboration between team members in pursuit of organizational goals.

Managers, in particular, play a critical role in connecting the strategic objectives of the business to the work their teams do.

Managers can do a lot to improve their team’s performance by creating a work environment where employees feel safe, investing in developing the capabilities of their people, and removing obstacles to work.

Knowledge is power, and you should give power to those who have the knowledge.

Exploratory analyses are a fun and exciting part of the research process. For those who are divergent thinkers, this is often the stage where new ideas, new hypotheses, and new research projects are generated and proposed.

Many people have heard the phrase “correlation doesn’t imply causation,” but what does that mean? The analyses done in the exploratory stage include correlation but not causation.

The more evidence we find to support a hypothesis, the more confidence we have for it. This process also helps to avoid the dangers that come from fishing for data—finding the spurious correlations that might randomly exist but have no real reason or explanation beyond chance.

A latent construct is a way of measuring something that can’t be measured directly. We can ask for the temperature of a room or the response time of a website—these things we can measure directly. A good example of something that can’t be measured directly is organizational culture.

By using latent constructs, we can ask one question for each aspect of the underlying idea. If we define the construct and write the items well, it works, conceptually, like a Venn diagram, with each survey question capturing a related aspect of the underlying concept.

Latent constructs that are periodically retested with statistics and exhibit good psychometric properties help us safeguard against rogue data.

Taking time to do periodic assessments that include the perceptions of the technologists that make and deliver your technology can uncover key insights into the bottlenecks and constraints in your system.

If you ignore the perceptions and experience of the professionals working on your systems entirely, you lose an important view into your systems.

Objective data is not influenced by feelings or emotions; in contrast, subjective data captures one’s perceptions or feelings about a situation.

If we want to understand how people feel about taking risks, sharing information, and communicating across boundaries, we have to ask them.

Our research design—a cross-sectional data collection for four years—recruited professionals and organizations familiar with the word DevOps.

Leadership really does have a powerful impact on results. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products.

We are in the midst of a complete transformation in the way value is created, delivered, and consumed.

You have to understand why, not just copy the behaviors," says Jannes Smit, IT Manager of Internet Banking and Omnichannel at ING Netherlands.

As a leader, you have to look at your own behaviors before you ask others to change," says Jannes Smit.

Before, I never discussed culture," he said. "It was a difficult topic and I did not know how to change it in a sustainable way. But I learned that when you change the way you work, you change the routines, you create a different culture.

Make it your own. This means three things: Don’t look to copy other enterprises on their methods and practices, or to implement an expert-designed model. Study and learn from them, but then experiment and adapt to what works for you and your culture.

Your current way of work took decades to entrench. It’s going to take time to change actions and thought patterns until they become new habits and, eventually, your new culture.

You just have to try it: learn, succeed, fail, learn, adjust, repeat. Rhythm and routine, rhythm and routine, rhythm and routine . . .

Remember: you can’t buy or copy high performance. You will need to develop your own capabilities as you pursue a path that fits your particular context and goals.

Transformational leadership supports and amplifies the technical and process work that is so essential in DevOps. It is comprised of five factors: vision, intellectual stimulation, inspirational communication, supportive leadership, and personal recognition.

High performers have the shortest integration times and branch lifetimes, with branch life and integration typically lasting hours –or a day.

A loosely coupled, well-encapsulated architecture drives IT performance.

Investment in DevOps was highly correlated to software delivery performance.

A very special thank you goes to my dad for instilling in me a sense of curiosity, a need for excellence, and an inability to take sh*t from people who don’t think I can do something.

Your support, encouragement, and wisdom—in life and in tech—have been invaluable.

Continuous delivery (CD) capabilities are correlated with delivery performance, deployment frequency, empowered teams, Lean product management, loosely coupled architecture, and organizational culture.

Lean management impacts organizational culture and reduces burnout.

Leadership is correlated with continuous integration, delivery performance, empowered teams, feedback, loosely coupled architecture, shift left on security, test automation, and working in small batches.

Diversity in teams is correlated with organizational performance.

Poor organizational culture is negatively correlated with burnout and deployment pain.

We use latent constructs and write our survey measures carefully and thoughtfully, avoiding the use of any propaganda items; we perform several statistical tests to confirm that our measures meet psychometric standards for validity and reliability; and we have a large dataset that pulls respondents from around the world, which serves as a safeguard against errors or bad actors.

It is through improving our ability to deliver software that organizations can deliver features faster, pivot when needed, respond to compliance and security changes, and take advantage of fast feedback to attract new customers and delight existing ones.

High performers do better at all of these measures. This is precisely what the Agile and Lean movements predict, but much dogma in our industry still rests on the false assumption that moving faster means trading off against other performance goals, rather than enabling and reinforcing them.

We found that where code deployments are most painful, you’ll find the poorest software delivery performance, organizational performance, and culture.

Burnout is physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion caused by overwork or stress—but it is more than just being overworked or stressed. Burnout can make the things we once loved about our work and life seem insignificant and dull.

All respondents are now working from the same items, the same words, and the same definitions. It doesn’t matter what they call it at their organization—it matters what they have been asked in the survey.