Release year: 2010

Authors: Jez Humble and David Farley

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⭐ Star quotes

  • (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.
  • (p. 24) In software, when something is painful, the way to reduce the pain is to do it more frequently, not less.
  • (p. 28) The Deming cycle is useful when holding retrospectives on the delivery process:
    1. plan
    2. do
    3. study/check
    4. act
  • (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.
  • (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.
  • (p. 73) Failing on build warning is good practice.
  • (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.
  • (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.
  • (p. 93) Have stories that follow the INVEST principles:
    • Independent
    • Negotiable
    • Valuable
    • Estimable
    • Small
    • Testable
  • (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
  • (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.”