Quotes from Gene Kim

One of the inherent challenges with initiatives such as DevOps transformations is that they are inevitably in conflict with ongoing business operations. Part

this is what an effective network is all about—when you can assemble a group of motivated people to solve a big problem, even though the team looks nothing like the official org chart.

Let's be honest," Patty says. "Priority 1 is whoever is yelling the loudest, with the tie-breaker being who can escalate to the most senior executive. Except when they're more subtle. I've seen a bunch of my staff always prioritizing a certain manager's requests, because he takes them out to lunch once a month.

He said he thought it was important to think through problems clearly, and for him, writing things down enforced a logical rigor that he thought was very important for leaders to have.

Information Security is always flashing their badges at people and making urgent demands, regardless of the consequences to the rest of the organization, which is why we don't invite them to many meetings.

now some of the best engineers in the company are working on making everyone else more productive. That's the way it should be, she thinks.

doing the same thing twice will not predictably or necessarily lead to the same result. It is this characteristic that makes static checklists and best practices, while valuable, insufficient to prevent catastrophes from occurring. See

the developers will eventually be responsible for testing their own code, with QA taking a more strategic role, coaching and consulting.

To mitigate these types of problems, we strive to reduce the number of handoffs, either by automating significant portions of the work or be reorganizing teams so they can deliver value to the customer themselves, instead of having to be constantly dependent on others.

Reflecting on the meeting, Maxine now appreciates how tenuous and fleeting the conditions that enable psychological safety can be. It depends on the behavior of leaders, one's peers, their moods, their sense of self-worth, wounds from their pasts … Given all this, it's amazing that psychological safety can be created at all, she thinks.

Complex work is managed so that problems in design and operations are revealed.

Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror. Or more likely, is on vacation.

everyone has learned something about how Data Hub actually works, in stark contrast with their mental models of how they thought it works.

In one case, we even found a ticket that Wes put in over ten years ago as a junior engineer, referring to some task for a machine that has been long since decommissioned.

Doing this requires disruption and innovation, which puts us at odds with groups who are currently responsible for daily operations and the internal bureaucracies, and who will almost always win.

When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else's expertise through practice.

New local knowledge is exploited globally throughout the organization.

Humble and Farley define the difference between unit and acceptance testing as, "The aim of a unit test is to show that a single part of the application does what the programmer intends it to....The objective of acceptance tests is to prove that our application does what the customer meant it to, not that it works the way its programmers think it should.

By choosing carefully where and how to start, we are able to experiment and learn in areas of our organization that create value without jeopardizing the rest of the organization. By doing this, we build our base of support, earn the right to expand the use of DevOps in our organization, and gain the recognition and gratitude of an ever-larger constituency.

These days, great teams doing consumer-oriented products have ratios of 1:6 because it's that important to create products that people love.

The more assumptions we can invalidate, the faster we can find and fix problems, increases our resilience, agility, and ability to learn and innovate.

Feedback and feedforward loops cause components within a system to reinforce or counteract each other.

Early in her career, the ratio of UX and designers to developers was 1:70. These days, great teams doing consumer-oriented products have ratios of 1:6 because it's that important to create products that people love.

Something is really screwy in the world when I'm finding reasons to thank Development and Security in the same day.