Accelerate Chapter 1 Discussion Points

We've recently started the book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations (found here). This is a list of discussion points for chapter 1.

• "Business as usual" is no longer enough to remain competitive
• In order to delight customers and rapidly deliver value to organizations:
• Use small teams
• Work in short cycles
• Measure feedback from users
• DevOps movement: how to build secure, resilient, rapidly evolving distributed systems at scale
• Focus on capabilities, not maturity
• The key to successful change is measuring and understanding the right things with a focus on capabilities -- not on maturity
• Maturity model:
• Focus on "arriving" at a mature state and being done
• "Lock-step" or linear, prescribing the same thing to all situations
• Simply measures technical proficiency or tooling install base
• Defines a static level to achieve
• Capability model:
• Focus on continual improvement in an ever changing landscape
• Customized approach to improvement, with a focus on capabilities of most benefit
• Focus on key outcomes and how capabilities drive improvement
• Allow for dynamically changing environments and focus on remaining competitive
• Evidence-based transformations focus on key capabilities
• There are disagreements on which capabilities to focus on
• A more guided, evidence-based solution is needed, which this book aims to show
• The value of adopting DevOps:
• The high performers have:
• 46 times more frequent code deployments
• 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy
• 170 times faster mean time to recover from downtime
• 5 times lower change failure rate (1/5 as likely for a change to fail)
• High performers understand that they don't have to trade speed for stability or vice versa, because by building quality in they get both