Preface

We are in the 2020s and research has shown us for more than 10 years that companies with high developer performance not only outperform their competitors in velocity and throughput, they also score higher in quality, innovation, security, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, customer satisfaction.

And yet, besides some unicorn companies, the majority of traditional businesses struggle to transform themselves. Established rigid structures and slow processes, monolithic application architectures, and long release cycles for traditional products make it hard for companies to change.

This, however, is not a new phenomenon. Transformational changes are always hard and take many years to succeed, if the companies do succeed at all. The probability of failure is also very high. This is because transformation has to happen on so many levels – and if these changes are not aligned, the transformation is bound to fail. This book will help you with your transformation - not only by providing the research for high developer performance but also by providing practical examples on how you can accelerate your software delivery.

This book is a practical guide to DevOps. It helps teams that are already on their DevOps journey to further advance into DevOps and speed up their software delivery performance by providing simple solutions to common problems. It will help teams find the right metrics to measure their success and learn from other success stories without just copying what these teams have done themselves. The book uses GitHub as the DevOps platform and shows how you can leverage the power of GitHub for collaboration, lean management, and secure and fast software delivery.

By the end of this book, readers will understand what influences software delivery performance and how they can measure delivery capabilities. They will therefore realize where they stand and how they can move forward in their journey with transparency and simple solutions for cross-team collaboration. Equipped with simple solutions for common problems, they will understand how they can leverage the power of GitHub to accelerate: by making work visible with GitHub Projects, measuring right metrics with GitHub Insights, using solid and proven engineering practices with GitHub Actions and Advanced Security, and moving to an event-based and loosely coupled software architecture.