Recommended CD Resources

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Over the years, I’ve collected useful resources to help solve the technical, process, and people problems that prevent us from delivering value daily. Some of these are people I’ve learned from, some are community projects I’m a member of, and some are papers I've written. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these to be useful.

• MinimumCD.org: A set of core practices to enable continuous delivery safely and sustainably in any environment.
• DojoConsortium.org: A collection of production-tested playbooks to help solve the problems teams face when trying to deliver value daily.
• An Integrated Approach to Enterprise Improvement: A paper I wrote for IT Revolution based on the experience of Improving engineering and delivery at Walmart
• How to Misuse & Abuse DORA Metrics: DORA metrics have become the newest improvement will-o-whisp being chased. In this paper, I talk about the problems we are seeing with DORA metrics, how to use them correctly and other metrics that should have more focus if the goal is to improve value delivery.
• CD Dependency Diagram from “Agile Rehab” at 2023 QConNYC

• Engineering the Digital Transformation: The hardest part of organizational improvement is getting alignment on goals. Gary Gruver’s book has a no-nonsense style of communicating how to improve the flow delivery and relentlessly improve quality processes in multiple contexts. He manages to do this in ways that everyone, no matter how technical, can understand. This is critical for alignment so everyone can work towards common goals.
• Modern Software Engineering: From Dave Farley, one of the authors of Continuous Delivery, comes a guide to what it means to be a modern software engineer and how to approach the work with a scientific and professional mindset. This book is the book I’ve needed for years. It has useful information on designing systems optimized for testability and feedback and focuses on the mindset required to deliver valuable solutions. It should be required reading for everyone aspiring to call themselves a “Software Engineer.”
• Continuous Delivery on YouTube: Just put this on auto-play while you’re working—so much good information for free covering every topic related to development.
• Sooner, Safer, Happier: Jonathan Smart points out the patterns and anti-patterns for organizational improvement. With decades of personal experience with success and failure, Jon knows what he’s talking about. This should be required reading for anyone wanting to improve their organization.
• Making Work Visible: Dominica DeGrandis explains how to optimize workflow for yourself and your team. She explains the power of limiting work in progress to drive things to completion. Do you feel overwhelmed, overloaded with work, and yet nothing is getting done? Read Dominica’s book. More “no” and less WIP!
• Team Topologies: In 1967, Melvin Conway stated, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” In Team Topologies, Matt Skelton and Manuel Pais show useful patterns for organizing teams efficiently to improve the flow of information and delivery. I was reading their blog before the book came out and was very excited to meet them at the book signing to thank them for their work. This is a must-read before planning your next reorg.
• Implementing Domain-Driven Design: Don’t build a single microservice or plan any large organization or architectural refactoring without reading Vaughn Vernon’s book. This covers tactical, code-level DDD and discusses the broader strategic organizational implications and design patterns.