Quotes from Gene Kim

Anthropologists describe tools as a cultural artifact.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning.

Just as important as throttling the release of work is managing the handoffs. The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage that resource is idle. So, if a resource is fifty percent utilized, the wait time is 50/50, or 1 unit. If the resource is ninety percent utilized, the wait time is 90/10, or nine times longer. And if the resource is ninety-nine percent utilized?

Don't fight stupid, make more awesome.

By doing this, Development and Operations may end up creating a shared work queue, instead of each silo using a different one (e.g., Development uses JIRA while Operations uses ServiceNow). A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents

For Phoenix, it takes us three or four weeks for new developers to get builds running on their machine, because we've never assembled the complete list of the gazillion things you need installed in order for it to compile and run. But now all we have to do is check out the virtual machine that Brent and team built, and they're all ready to go.

One of the key lessons in Lean is that in order to shrink lead times and increase quality, we must strive to continually shrink batch sizes. The theoretical lower limit for batch size is single-piece flow, where each operation is performed one unit at a time.

My guys wanted to call it "Cujo" or "Stiletto." But the developers wanted to call it "Unicorn." Unicorn? Like rainbows and Care Bears? And against all my expectations, "Unicorn" wins the vote. Developers. I'll never understand them.

Traditional managers will often object to hiring engineers with generalist skill sets, arguing that they are more expensive and that 'I can hire two server administrators for every multi-skilled operations engineer.'" However, the business benefits of enabling faster flow are overwhelming. Furthermore, as Prugh notes, "[ I] nvesting in cross training is the right thing for [employees'] career growth, and makes everyone's work more fun.

I'm pretty sure we don't do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accept work. Which means we're always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile applications in production.

The vendor assured us that it's safe, and we checked all their references.

The Phoenix Project is ultimately a book about transformation, and so it is incredibly gratifying to see it being used as an instrument to create transformations in real life as well.

You're right that you can't achieve the strategic until you've mastered the tactical,

In 1958, the Fortune 500 tenure was 61 years; now it's only 18 years.

Indeed, one of the findings in the 2015 State of DevOps Report validated that the age of the application was not a significant predictor of performance; instead, what predicted performance was whether the application was architected (or could be re-architected) for testability and deployability.

Everyone around here thinks features are important, because they can see them in their app, on the web page, or in the API. But no one seems to realize how important the build process is. Developers cannot be productive without a great build, integration, and test process.

the four types of work: business projects, it Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work.

We are clueless about what our customers want! We have too much product that will never sell and never enough of the ones that do.

Then it hits me. The majority of our marketing projects can't be done without it. High touch marketing requires high tech. But if there's so many of us assigned to these Marketing projects, shouldn't they be coming to us?

what's the plural of 'developer'?" says Maxine. "A 'merge conflict.

It is ignorance that is the mother of all problems, and the only thing that can overcome it is learning.

Because they're likely art or music majors, not people with a technology background, they'll publicly promise the impossible and IT will have to figure out how to deliver.

When you spend all your time firefighting, there's little time or energy left for planning.

we value improvement of our daily work more than daily work itself.