I’m not sure why I put off reading Accelerate. I love The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook, and this book is the spiritual successor to both. The DevOps Handbook is the most practical of the three books: there are lots of concrete examples of what implementing DevOps practices will look like, with case studies from the industry. Accelerate’s focus is different. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim have done the math and want you to know that if you follow the practices outlined in the book you will end up with a better company. You can continuous delivery yourself to a high-functioning high-trust super-organization: the stats don’t lie! They say things like, “High-performing teams were more likely to incorporate information security into the delivery process,” with confidence because they have the numbers to back it up. The book is direct in how it talks about every facet of an organization that’s embraced DevOps.
I was happy to see Information Security, often an afterthought in our industry, get top billing in this book. Application Security feels like something all developers know they should care about, but often don’t. (My old boss would compare AppSec to flossing, which feels apt.) Accelerate makes the case there is value to be had in caring: “Our research shows that building security into software development not only improves delivery performance but also improves security quality. Organizations with high delivery performance spend significantly less time remediating security issues.” Boom goes the dynamite.
