Release year: 2010

Authors: Jez Humble and David Farley

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Link to my handwritten notes

Review

Félix rating:
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⭐ Star quotes

  1. (p. xxiii) Cycle time is the time from deciding that you need to make a change to having it in production. It is a vital metric for any project.
  2. (p. 24) In software, when something is painful, the way to reduce the pain is to do it more frequently, not less.
  3. (p. 28) The Deming cycle is useful when holding retrospectives on the delivery process:
    1. plan
    2. do
    3. study/check
    4. act
  4. (p. 40) “Ultimate configurability” is a common antipattern. The more configurability you intend to offer users, the fewer constraints you can place on the system config, thus the more sophisticated the env needs to become.
  5. (p. 50) Lock down production. It should not be possible for anyone to make a change to prod without going through the organization’s change management process, because even a tiny change could break production completely.
  6. (p. 73) Failing on build warning is good practice.
  7. (p. 75) Having personal contact with members from other groups of a distributed team is important because it builds trust. Trust is the first thing to suffer in a distributed team.
  8. (p. 87) We tend to limit Automated Acceptance Testing to complete coverage of “happy paths” behaviors, and limited coverage of the most important other parts.
  9. (p. 93) Have stories that follow the INVEST principles:
    • Independent
    • Negotiable
    • Valuable
    • Estimable
    • Small
    • Testable
  10. (p. 139) Metrics useful for diagnostics of the deployment pipeline to warn of problems (these are secondary to cycle time)
    • Automated test coverage
    • Properties of the codebase
      • duplication
      • cyclomatic complexity
      • efferent and afferent coupling
      • style
    • Number of defects
    • Velocity of team to deliver working, tested, ready to use code
    • Number of commits to version control per day
    • Number of builds per day
    • Number of build failures per day
    • Duration of build, including automated tests
  11. (p. 228) What many people often mean when they say “I want the application to respond in 2 seconds” is “I don’t want to sit in front of a computer without any feedback for too long.”