A silver bullet?
Mar. 19th, 2019 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Accelerate - Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations, by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim
This was the book all the speakers were talking about at QCon. Of course they were, by and large, following the practices advocated, at which point maybe it's something of a post hoc justification; but maybe there was a greater variety of positions among the attendees at large, and it would give them some pause for thought and/or evidence for advocacy in changing their practices back in the office. Way back in the 1980s Fred Brooks posited that there was no silver bullet for software engineering; yet in recent years, DevOps has really taken off, and the authors have data that suggests adoption of some key practices - measured by deployment pipeline duration, deployment frequency, mean time to fix, and change failure rate - really does distinguish high performing organisations from the rest, even to the point of possibly defining an inverse Conway manoeuvre. In the first part of the book, they offer some commentary and suggestions for taking this approach. The second part takes an unexpected tangent, discussing the merits and designs of survey-based research; I'm sure this is valid stuff, but it seems to target quite a different audience, of survey researchers rather than IT practitioners.
This was the book all the speakers were talking about at QCon. Of course they were, by and large, following the practices advocated, at which point maybe it's something of a post hoc justification; but maybe there was a greater variety of positions among the attendees at large, and it would give them some pause for thought and/or evidence for advocacy in changing their practices back in the office. Way back in the 1980s Fred Brooks posited that there was no silver bullet for software engineering; yet in recent years, DevOps has really taken off, and the authors have data that suggests adoption of some key practices - measured by deployment pipeline duration, deployment frequency, mean time to fix, and change failure rate - really does distinguish high performing organisations from the rest, even to the point of possibly defining an inverse Conway manoeuvre. In the first part of the book, they offer some commentary and suggestions for taking this approach. The second part takes an unexpected tangent, discussing the merits and designs of survey-based research; I'm sure this is valid stuff, but it seems to target quite a different audience, of survey researchers rather than IT practitioners.