Quotes from Gene Kim

Completely disoriented, I look around and realize that I'm at work and that I must have fallen asleep while waiting for the Phoenix status meeting to start. I sneak a peek at my watch. 11:04 a.m.

The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with Security. The two working together gives us means, motive, and opportunity.

I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are? Suddenly, I'm kicking myself that I didn't ask these questions on my first day.

This fast and frequent feedback is such a big part of achieving the Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy. And all of this was enabled by properly elevating the improvement of daily work over daily work itself, as dictated by the Third Ideal.

The famous Andon cord is just one of their many tools that enable learning. When anyone encounters a problem, everyone is expected to ask for help at any time, even if it means stopping the entire assembly line. And they are thanked for doing so, because it is an opportunity to improve daily work.

If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you're wrong. Dead wrong," he says. "Your job as VP of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure IT service.

Code deployment lead time, code deployment frequency, and time to resolve problems are predictive of software delivery, operational performance, and organizational performance, and they correlate with burnout, employee engagement, and so much more.

You must figure out how to control the release of work into IT Operations and, more importantly, ensure that your most constrained resources are doing only the work that serves the goal of the entire system, not just one silo.

a small number of reliable, automated tests are almost always preferable over a large number of manual or unreliable automated tests.

Locality in our code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling us to deliver features faster.

Creating software should be a collaborative and conversational endeavor—individuals need to interact with each other to create new knowledge and value for the customer.

Locality in our organizations allows teams to make decisions without having to communicate and coordinate with people outside the team, potentially having to get approvals from distant authorities or committees so far removed from the work that they have no relevant basis to make good decisions," he says, clearly disgusted.

The opposite of the Third Ideal is someone who values process compliance and TWWADI," he says with a big smile. "You know, 'The Way We've Always Done It.' It's the huge library of rules and regulations, processes and procedures, approvals and stage gates, with new rules being added all the time to prevent the latest disaster from happening again.

Without constant feedback from a centralized build, integration, and test system, they really have no idea what will happen when all their work is merged with everyone else's.

Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits.

When every team expedites their work, the net result is that every project ends up moving at the same slow crawl.

Maxine loves coding and she's awesome at it. But she knows that there's something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.

achieving this greatness is never free. It requires focus and elevation of improvement of daily work, even over daily work itself. Without this ruthless focus, every simple system degrades over time, increasingly buried under a tundra of technical debt.

Next, we found numerous instances where developers have administrative access to production applications and databases. This violates the required segregation of duty required to prevent risk for fraud.

When John agrees, I thank him for his time. "Wait, one more question. Why do you believe that this product didn't cause the failure? Did you test the change?" There's a short silence on the phone before John replies, "No, we couldn't test the change. There's no test environment. Apparently, you guys requested a budget years ago, but…" I should have known.

If we know it's that prone to crashing, why do we need to change it?

Without these self-service Operations platforms, the cloud is just Expensive Hosting 2.0.

What got worked on was based on who yelled the loudest or most often, who could engineer the best side deals with the expediters, or who could get the ear of the highest ranking executive.

The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date.