This book has come up in various discussions again and again since its release so I finally decided to read it. I wasn’t sure what to think of it going in, having worked a lot in “DevOps settings” before.

There is a ton of really good stuff in this book. If you’re looking for an introduction into how to build a high performance engineering culture, and which things to focus on, then this is definitely a book that will help you and guide you in the right direction. And the big take away from the book is that there are 4 software delivery performance measures to focus on:

• Lead Time
• Deployment Frequency
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR)
• Change Fail Percentage

Unfortunately not a lot of what is in the book was new to me. Which is why it felt like a bit of a drag to me to get through it. And I personally also had some problems with the very prescriptive style of the findings. The longer I work in technology the more I tend to gravitate towards “it depends” on most things. Like deployment frequency is so highly correlated to the development process and whether or not there are actually features to be written that it’s really hard to just say more deployments always means better.

I really appreciated the inclusion of the research methodology in such detail in the book. That was the part where a ton was new to me and I really learned a couple of things about how to extract data from surveys.