Accelerate is a great book that describes characteristics of high performing software delivery teams and organizations. I’d definitely recommend reading it to get some great ideas to try with your team.
Who should read this book
Since this book shows how different techniques and practices can help teams to be high performers, this book should be read anyone who has an interest in the performance of their organisation.
If you are a leader within a software delivery team or a manager in a company that want’s to support high performing teams, there is some great advice on how you can be an enabler for improvements.
Not just agile practices
I’m a huge fan of agile practices. I think it’s super important to think about not just the software you are delivering but also, how you deliver it.
I’ve seen how agile practices such as Kanban or lean product techniques can help you deliver more value quickly. However, in order to deliver high quality software, agile practices can’t do it alone, you need to remember the software part as well. It was really refreshing for Accelerate to go in to detail around technical abilities of teams and software practices in order to gain an advantage.
Metrics
Having reliable metrics to measure the performance of a team is hugely important. Without good metrics to track, you wouldn’t be able to measure if your actions are helping to improve the output of the team.
Cycle time is a great metric to use to measure the performance of a team. If the time it takes a team to take a feature from getting requirements, through the development process, and into a production environment is being shortened, then the team is likely to be working in the right direction.
Accelerate does a great job of outlining and explaining several metrics that can be used to measure the performance of a software delivery team.
Research techniques
Several of the chapters in the book are around explaining the research methodologies that went in to the writing of the book.
These are helpful chapters as they help to give the answers in the book validity and explanations over simple anecdotal evidence.