Accelerate Chapter 9 Discussion Points

Chapter 9 of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, is about making work sustainable.

• Burnout and deployment pain are important issues to address
• Deployment pain
• Highlights the friction and disconnect that exist between
• The activities used to develop and test software and 
• The work done to maintain and keep software operational
• This is where development meets IT operations
• Where code deployments are most painful, you'll find the poorest software delivery performance, organizational performance, and culture
• It is also a concern when development and test teams have no visibility into code deployments
• If they aren't aware of the deployment process, there are probably barrier hiding the work from them
• Barrier that hide the work of deployment from developers are rarely good, because they isolate developers from the downstream consequences of their work
• Teams reduce deployment pain when they improve key technical capabilities, such as:
• Implement comprehensive test and deployment automation
• Use continuous integration, including trunk-based development
• Shift left on security
• Effectively manage test data
• Use loosely coupled architectures
• Can work independently
• Use version control of everything required to reproduce production environments
• The technical practices that improve our ability to deliver software with both speed and stability also reduce the stress and anxiety associated with pushing code to production
• There's a high correlation showing that the more painful the code deployments are, the poorer the IT performance, organizational performance, and organizational culture
• Most deployment problems are caused by a complex, brittle deployment process stemming from these factors:
• Software is often not written with deployability in mind
• Manual changes must be made to production environment as part of the deployment process
• Require multiple handoffs between teams, particularly in siloed organizations
• To reduce deployment pain:
• Build systems that:
• Are designed to be deployed easily into multiple environments
• Can detect and tolerate failures in their environments
• Can have various components of the system updated independently
• Ensure that the state of production systems can be reproduced (with the exception of production data) in an automated fashion from information in version control
• Build intelligence into the application and the platform so that the deployment process can be as simple as possible
• Applications designed for a platform-as-a-service can typically be deployed using a single command
• Burnout
• Deployment pain can lead to burnout if left unchecked
• It is physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion caused by overwork or stress
• It can make things we once loved about our work and life seem insignificant and dull
• It often manifests as a feeling of helplessness, and is correlated with pathological cultures and unproductive, wasteful work
• Research shows that stressful jobs can be as bad for physical health as secondhand smoke and obesity
• Stress costs the US economy $300 billion per year in sick time, long-term disability, and excessive job turnover
• Organizations can fix the conditions that lead to burnout by 
• Fostering a supportive work environment
• Ensuring work is meaningful
• Ensuring employees understand how their own work ties to strategic objectives
• Managers should concentrate on:
• Fostering a respectful, supportive work environment that emphasizes learning from failures rather than blaming
• Communicating a strong sense of purpose
• Investing in employee development
• Asking employees what is preventing them from achieving their objectives and then fixing those things
• Giving employees time, space, and resources to experiment and learn
• Common problems that can lead to burnout
• Six organizational risk factors that predict burnout:
• Work overload: job demand exceed human limits
• Lack of control: inability to influence decisions that affect your job
• Insufficient rewards: insufficient financial, institutional, or social rewards
• Breakdown of community: unsupportive workplace environment
• Absence of fairness: lack of fairness in decision-making processes
• Value conflicts: mismatch in organizational values and the individual's values
• Most organizations try to fix the person and ignore the work environment, even though fixing the environment has a higher likelyhood of success
• How to reduce or fight burnout
• Five organizational factors that are highly correlated with high levels of burnout:
• Organizational culture
• Managers are responsible for fostering a supportive and respectful work environment
• They can do so by
• Creating a blame-free environment
• Striving to learn from failures
• Communicating a shared sense of purpose
• Remembering that human error is never the root cause of failure in systems
• Deployment pain
• With the right practices in place, deployments don't have to be painful events
• Managers should ask their teams how painful their deployments are and fix the things that hurt the most
• Effectiveness of leaders
• Responsibilities of a team leader include limiting work in process and eliminating roadblocks for the team so they can get their work done
• Organizational investments in DevOps
• Organizations that invest in developing the skills and capabilities of their teams get better outcomes
• Investing in training and providing people with the necessary support and resources (including time) to acquire new skills are critical to the successful adoption of DevOps
• Organizational performance
• Lean management and continuous delivery practices improve software delivery performance
• At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work
• This means creating a work environment that:
• Supports experimentation, failure, and learning
• Allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs
• Creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week, and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours
• By aligning organizational values with individual values, employee burnout can be reduced