Measuring Continuous Delivery

by Steve Smith

In this book, Steve Smith shows how to measure your Continuous Delivery journey, from how fast you are currently going to how fast you want to go.

Continuous Delivery is a set of holistic principles and practices to reduce time to market and provide an organization with a strategic competitive advantage, but adoption is invariably a challenging and time-consuming journey. Before adoption, the current time to market and desired time to market are often unknown, which makes alignment and collaboration between individuals, teams, and departments difficult. During adoption practices, techniques, and tools are often introduced without acceptance criteria, with makes it hard to assess and learn from the impact of changes.

What does a successful Continuous Delivery outcome look like, how do we move towards that outcome, and how do we measure our progress along the way? To answer these questions, we need an ongoing quantification of delivery stability and speed.

The foreword to this book is written by Dave Farley, co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010).

PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Audible Audio

Published December 22, 2020

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Bjoern Rochel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shows how you can reapply DORA’s/Accelerates 4 key metrics to CI/CD. With that it contains very concrete guidance on how to construct the metrics and indicators. Speaking of which, I found also the clear definitions of measure, metric and indicator useful.

The book also got some bonus points for using ToC and Goltratts 5 focusing steps for selecting the next constraints and appropriate improvement strategy while pursuing continuous improvement in a CI/CD pipeline.

I found it a bit dry and repetitive though and for me the examples of a fictional company weren’t that interesting. I put that down to the fact that the environment I work in is already good in CI/CD and also is half way finished with constructing its metrics dashboard(s). So there weren’t big insights to get for me here.

Solid 3 stars.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is unfinished, but promising. Could use some guidance on particular tools to capture metrics in a useful way.

[Simon Hohenadl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like the narrator and could not follow the book. Possibly better as a printed or ebook version.