In this book, I will show you 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 organisation 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. 

Who should read this book

I wrote this book for executives, managers, leaders, and practitioners who wish to adopt Continuous Delivery. I want to help people who are stuck on one or more of the following questions:

• What would Continuous Delivery look like for my organisation?
• Where should I start to try and make improvements?
• How do I know if practice X/technique Y/tool Z has had a positive impact? 

Over the past 10 years I've worked on Continuous Delivery in financial, media, governmental, and retail organisations. I've used delivery metrics to steer large scale Continuous Delivery programmes, including 10 teams at a media organisation for 3 years and 60 teams in a UK government department for 2.5 years. I will show how automating a collection of holistic metrics can provide powerful insights into Continuous Delivery.

In this book

This book describes the what, why, and how of measuring Continuous Delivery.

Chapter 1 introduces the main theme of the book - how to facilitate a successful adoption of Continuous Delivery, by combining the Improvement Kata with stability and throughput measurements. Chapter 2 outlines the theory behind measures, metrics, and indicators of stability and throughput. Chapters 3 to 7 are a deep dive into Deployment Stability, Deployment Throughput, Build Stability, Build Throughput, and Code Throughput indicators. Chapter 8 shows how to use those indicators to power the Improvement Kata and implement Continuous Delivery.

This book will contain a high-level discussion of Continuous Delivery principles, practices, and techniques. The reader is assumed to have already read at least parts of Continuous Delivery by Dave Farley and Jez Humble, and Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O'Reilly. There will be little advice on specific tools, as there is a smorgabord of good tools available in the Continuous Delivery space and there is never a single, perfect tool.

Foreword

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).

Thanks for reading!