In this article series, we’re discussing the following three principle-based DevOps frameworks. The first was The Three Ways as described in The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook.
In Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, authors Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim present research that surfaces the key technical and management practices that high-performing DevOps teams have adopted and continue to refine.
According to Accelerate authors, the technical practices used by high-performing DevOps teams are focused in three key areas:
The Accelerate authors chose to combine several different practices, each important on its own as a discipline, under the umbrella of continuous delivery (CD). Although CD itself is its own principle, keep in mind that high-performing DevOps teams are doing all of these things in concert with one another to achieve a truly exemplary continuous delivery model:
When it comes to DevOps architecture considerations, the characteristics that most high-performing teams were likely to agree with were the following:
The Accelerate authors are quick to mention that the type of technology used, no matter how popular, is no guarantee of high performance:
“…employing the latest whizzy microservices architecture deployed on containers is no guarantee of higher performance if you ignore these characteristics.”
In fact, the characteristics described above—testability and deployability—are achieved by implementing the following two architectural technical principles of high-performing DevOps teams, as Accelerate authors explain:
High-performing DevOps teams have also embedded the following key principles into their product management processes:
According to Accelerate authors, the management practices used by high-performing DevOps teams are focused in two key areas:
In our Why DevOps? article, we discussed how Lean grew out of the need to deliver value to customers faster by identifying and removing waste from a manufacturing process, or (put another way) by reducing lead times through optimization of the value stream.
Some of the key management practices of Lean management and monitoring include:
Accelerate authors discuss Westrum’s generative (performance-based) organizational culture as one where “information flows unimpeded and drives better software delivery performance and, ultimately, organizational performance.”
Some of the key management practices around culture include:
Next, we'll look at The CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing) framework for assessing DevOps.
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Sources:
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim