Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

Westrum’s theory posits that organizations with better information flow function more effectively.

But I learned that when you change the way you work, you change the routines, you create a different culture.”

As you have seen in our virtual visit to ING, a high-performance culture is far more than just the application of tools, the adoption of a set of interrelated practices, copying the behaviors of other successful organizations, or the implementation of a prescribed, expert-designed framework. It is the development, through experimentation and learni

a recent study by James Bessen of Boston University found that the strategic use of technology explains revenue and productivity gains more than mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and entrepreneurship (2017).

that software delivery performance predicts Lean product management practices. This reciprocal relationship, suggested by the literature, forms what is known as a virtuous cycle. Improving your software delivery effectiveness will improve your ability to work in small batches and incorporate customer feedback along the way.

By giving developers the tools to detect problems when they occur, the time and resources to invest in their development, and the authority to fix problems straight away, we create an environment where developers accept responsibility for global outcomes

Jordi says that the squads think of improvement activities as just regular work.

How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw clearl

John Shook, describing his experiences transforming the culture of the teams at the Fremont, California, car manufacturing plant that was the genesis of the Lean manufacturing movement in the US, wrote, “what my . . . experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to