This book emerged from the partnership between DORA and Puppet on the State of DevOps Reports. Thus, we’d like to start by thanking the Puppet team, and in particular Alanna Brown and Nigel Kersten who were the principal contributors from the Puppet side. We’d also like to thank Aliza Earnshaw for her meticulous work editing the State of DevOps Reports over several years. The report would not be the same without her careful eye.

The authors would also like to thank several people who helped develop the hypotheses we test in the report. From 2016, we thank Steven Bell and Karen Whitley Bell for their promptings to investigate Lean product management, and for their time spent on research and discussions with the team on the theories of value stream and visibility of customer feedback. From 2017, we thank Neal Ford, Martin Fowler, and Mik Kersten for the items measuring architecture, and Amy Jo Kim and Mary Poppendieck for team experimentation.

Several experts kindly donated their time to help review early drafts of this book. We’d like to offer deep gratitude to Ryn Daniels, Jennifer Davis, Martin Fowler, Gary Gruver, Scott Hain, Dmitry Kirsanov, Courtney Kissler, Bridget Kromhout, Karen Martin, Dan North, and Tom Poppendieck.

We’d like to thank Anna Noak, Todd Sattersten, and the whole IT Revolution team for all their hard work on this project. Finally, Dmitry Kirsanov and Alina Kirsanova took care of copyediting, proofreading, indexing, and composing the book with distinctive thoroughness and care. Thank you.

NICOLE

First and foremost, many thanks to my coauthors and collaborators, without whom this work wouldn’t be possible. Y’all didn’t kick me off the project when I first showed up and told you it was wrong—politely, I hope. Jez, I’ve learned patience, empathy, and a renewed love for tech I thought had waned. Gene, your boundless enthusiasm and drive for “just one more analysis!” keeps our work strong and exciting. The data for this project comes from the State of DevOps Reports, which were conducted with Puppet Inc. From the Puppet team, Nigel Kersten and Alanna Brown: thank you for your collaboration and helping us to craft a narrative that resonates with our audience. And of course Aliza Earnshaw: your skill goes far beyond copyediting and made my work infinitely better. I loved that we could hash it out until we reached agreement; when you told me I was “meticulously rigorous,” it was the best compliment ever.

A very special thank you goes to my dad for instilling in me a sense of curiosity, a need for excellence, and an inability to take sh*t from people who don’t think I can do something. It has all come in handy over the years, particularly as a woman in tech. Sorry you missed the party, Dad. Many thanks to my mom for always being my #1 cheerleader and supporter; whatever my crazy plans, she always trusts me. I love you both.

As always, my biggest thanks and deepest gratitude go to Xavier Velasquez. My best friend and first sounding board, you’ve been there for the entire journey—when it was inspired from an odd usability study in the midst of a storm, to a hard pivot in my PhD program, then inviting myself into the State of DevOps Reports, and now finally this book. Your support, encouragement, and wisdom—in life and in tech—have been invaluable.

Suzie! How did I ever get so lucky? I had an advisor who took a gamble on a PhD student who promised you that studying tech professionals, their tools, and their environment—and how it all impacted their work—would be important and relevant. (Those at top PhD programs will understand that this is, indeed, a gamble, with real risks involved.) Ten years later, my research has grown and evolved and we call it DevOps. Many thanks to you, Suzanne Weisband, for trusting my instincts and guiding my research those early years. You’ve been the best advisor, cheerleader, and now friend.

To my post-doc advisors, mentors, and frequent peer-review coauthors Alexandra Durcikova and Rajiv Sabherwal: you also took risks conducting research with me in a new context, and I have learned so much from our collaborations. My methods are stronger, my arguments more reasoned, and my ability to see a problem space is more developed. Thank you.

Many thanks to the DevOps community, who welcomed and accepted a crazy researcher and have participated in the studies and shared your stories. My work is better because of you, and more importantly, I am better because of you. Much love.

And finally, thanks to Diet Coke for getting me through long stints of writing and editing.

JEZ

Many thanks to my wife and BFF Rani for supporting me working on this book even after I promised I wouldn’t write another one. You’re the best! I love you. Thanks to my daughters for bringing so much fun and joy into the proceedings, and to my mum and dad for supporting my adventures with computers as a kid.

Nicole took an industry survey, Puppet’s State of DevOps Report, and turned it into a scientific tool. Our industry has always struggled with applying science to the development and operation of software products and services. The social systems that support software delivery are too irreducibly complex to make randomized, controlled experiments practical. In retrospect, the solution was clear: use behavioral science to study these systems. Nicole’s careful, thorough pioneering of this approach has produced incredible results, and it’s hard to overstate the impact of her work. It’s been an honor to be her partner in this research, and I’ve learned an enormous amount. Thank you.

The reason I’m involved with this project at all is Gene, who invited me to be part of the State of DevOps team back in 2012. Gene, your passion for this project—and, on a personal level, for challenging my hypotheses and analysis (yes, I’m talking about trunk-based development)—has made this both substantially more rigorous and highly rewarding.

I also want to thank the Puppet team who’ve contributed so much to this work and without whom it wouldn’t exist, particularly Alanna Brown, Nigel Kersten, and Aliza Earnshaw. Thank you.

GENE

I am grateful to Margueritte, my loving wife of twelve years, as well as my sons, Reid, Parker, and Grant—I know that I could not do the work I love without their support and tolerance of deadlines, late nights, and round-the-clock texting. And of course, my parents, Ben and Gail Kim, for helping me become a nerd early in life.

This research with Jez and Nicole has been some of the most satisfying and illuminating I’ve ever had the privilege of working on—no one could ask for a better team of collaborators. I genuinely believe this work significantly advances our profession, by helping us better define how we improve technology work, through rigorous theory building and testing.

And of course, thank you to Alanna Brown and Nigel Kersten at Puppet for the amazing 5+ year collaboration on State of DevOps project, from which so much of this book is based upon.