a16z Podcast

with Nicole Forsgren (@nicolefv), Jez Humble (@jezhumble) and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90) From the claims that "IT doesn't matter" and questions of "does IT matter?" -- at least in terms of technology and organizational performance -- industry has been consumed with measuring what drives software performance. Because it's not good enough to talk about what happens in one isolated team or successful company; we need to be able to predict, and make it happen, at any company -- of any size, in any industry vertical, in any geography, with any architecture/tech stack. So this episode of the a16z Podcast boldly goes where no man has gone before -- trying to answer those elusive questions -- by drawing on one of the largest, large-scale studies of software and organizational performance out there, as presented in the new book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps -- Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Forsgren (co-founder, CEO and Chief Scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment or DORA; PhD in Management Information Systems; former sysadmin and hardware performance analyst) and Humble (co-founder and CTO at DORA, formerly at 18F, and co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Continuous Delivery) share the latest findings about high-performing companies of all kinds -- even those who may not think they’re tech companies -- as well as their vantage points on the history, evolution, and definitions of "DevOps". Where does DevOps fit in the broader landscape of related tech movements and tools (like lean manufacturing, agile development, microservices and containerization of code)? Can we truly break the false dichotomy of performance vs. speed, and have both? Finally, what drives successful organizational culture and change, beyond using so-called "readiness levels"? And can we figure out how to measure software productivity already??