Jez Humble Quotes

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

Instead of creating controls to compensate for pathological cultures, the solution is to create a culture in which people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions

The long-term value of an enterprise is not captured by the value of its products and intellectual property but rather by its ability to continuously increase the value it provides to customers — and to create new customers — through innovation.

There are two rules of thumb architects follow when decomposing systems. First, ensure that adding a new feature tends to change only one service or a component at a time. This reduces interface churn.6 Second, avoid “chatty” or fine-grained communication between services. Chatty services scale poorly and are harder to impersonate for testing purposes.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

true agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.

the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

So, when should you think about automating a process? The simplest answer is, “When you have to do it a second time.” The third time you do something, it should be done using an automated process. This fine-grained incremental approach rapidly creates a system for automating the repeated parts of your development, build, test, and deployment process.

In his revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, Paulo Freire describes what is still the dominant model of teaching today. In this model, students are viewed as empty “bank accounts” to be filled with knowledge by teachers — not as participants who have a say in what and how they learn. This model is not designed to enable students to learn — especially not to learn to think for themselves — but rather to control the learning process, students’ access to information, and their ability to critically analyze it. In this way, the education system perpetuates existing social structures and power hierarchies.

In reality, however, this type of command and control has not been fashionable in military circles since 1806 when the Prussian Army, a classic plan-driven organization, was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s decentralized, highly motivated forces. Napoleon used a style of war known as maneuver warfare to defeat larger, better-trained armies. In maneuver warfare, the goal is to minimize the need for actual fighting by disrupting your enemy’s ability to act cohesively through the use of shock and surprise. A key element in maneuver warfare is being able to learn, make decisions, and act faster than your enemy — the same capability that allows startups to disrupt enterprises.

If the cultural and management barriers are simply too strong for this kind of “ambidextrous” approach, the alternative is to spin off a maximally independent business unit.

Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today.

Having empathy for customers and users is a powerful force. When we empathize, we enhance our ability to receive and process information.77 Empathy in design requires deliberate practice. We must design experiments and interaction opportunities to connect with our customers and users in meaningful ways and challenge our assumptions, preconceptions, and prejudices. We need to assume the role of an interested inquirer, trying to understand the challenges they experience.

People who cannot temporarily let go of their role and status, or set aside their own expertise and opinions, will fail to develop empathy with others’ conflicting thoughts,

experiences, or mental models. The ability to listen and ask the right questions becomes a powerful skill, and the insights it brings are the foundation of effective problem solving and experimentation.

Gamestorming by David Gray et al.,69 and the supporting Go Gamestorming Wiki,

the project approach judges people according to whether work is completed on time and on budget, not based on the value delivered to customers, productivity gets measured based on output rather than outcomes.

The key to creating a lean enterprise is to enable those doing the work to solve their customers’ problems in a way that is aligned with the strategy of the wider organization.

Dear Eric, thank you for your service to this company. Unfortunately, the job you have been doing is no longer available, and the company you used to work for no longer exists. However, we are pleased to offer you a new job at an entirely new company, that happens to contain all the same people as before. This new job began months ago, and you are already failing at it. Luckily, all the strategies you’ve developed that made you successful at the old company are entirely obsolete. Best of luck!32

not “can we build it?” but “should we build it?

Scrum’s team-level velocity measure is not all that meaningful outside of the context of a particular team. Managers should never attempt to compare velocities of different teams or aggregate estimates across teams. Unfortunately, we have seen team velocity used as a measure to compare productivity between teams, a task for which it is neither designed nor suited. Such an approach may lead teams to “game” the metric, and even to stop collaborating effectively with each other.

Both strategy and culture will evolve in response to changes in the environment, and leaders are responsible for directing this evolution and for ensuring that culture and strategy support each other to achieve the purpose.

Skeptics often treat size, regulation, perceived complexity, legacy technology, or some other special characteristic of the domain in which they operate as a barrier to change.

the most serious barrier is to be found in organizational culture, leadership, and strategy.

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective” [deming],

No major piece of work should be fully funded before we have evidence to support the business and economic model on which it is based, and this exploration must be done with small, cross-functional teams with a limited runway,

When faced with a new opportunity or a problem to be solved, our human instinct is to jump straight to a solution without adequately exploring the problem space, testing the assumptions inherent in the proposed solution, or challenging ourselves to validate the solution with real users.

and transition our focus from building the right thing to building the thing right.

It is hard to let go of the long-held belief that strong, centralized control provides valuable efficiencies. However well it may have served us in an era of lower complexity and slower technical advances, it now creates barriers that prevent us from adapting quickly to emerging opportunities.

Whenever you hear of a new IT project starting up with a large budget, teams of tens or hundreds of people, and a timeline of many months before something actually gets shipped, you can expect the project will go over time and budget and not deliver the expected value.

As Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today.

seem banal, but it was an incredibly powerful experience for many of the UAW employees. The TPS makes building quality into products the highest priority, so a problem must be fixed as soon as possible after it’s discovered, and the system must then be improved to try and prevent that from happening again. Workers and managers cooperate to make this possible. The moment a worker discovers a problem, he or she can summon the manager by pulling on a cord (the famous andon cord). The manager will then come and help to try and resolve the problem. If the problem cannot be resolved within the time available, the worker can stop the production line until the problem is fixed. The team will later experiment with, and implement, ideas to prevent the problem from occurring again.

In Lean IT, Steve Bell and Mike Orzen comment that “users are often unable to articulate exactly what they need, yet they often seem insistent about what they don’t want…once they see it.”57

We should stop using the word “requirements” in product development, at least in the context of nontrivial features. What we have, rather, are hypotheses. We believe that a particular business model, or product, or feature, will prove valuable to customers. But we must test our assumptions. We can take a scientific approach to testing these assumptions by running experiments.

When everybody in the organization has been trained to employ the scientific approach to innovation as part of their daily work, we will have created a generative culture. We achieve this by practicing the experimental approach until it becomes habitual, part of our repertoire, using the Improvement Kata described in Chapter 6. That is what allows an organization to adapt rapidly to its changing environment. Toyota calls this “building people before building cars.”66

Mike Roberts says, “Continuous means much more often than you think”),

ROI in IT programs is not very sensitive to cost, but rather to whether the program will be cancelled and to the utilization of the resulting system. These variables depend primarily on whether we have built the right thing. However, the standard enterprise planning process provides almost no validation of this.

By keeping our initial customer base small — not chasing vanity numbers to get too big too fast — we force ourselves to keep it simple and maintain close contact with our customers every step of the way.

no plan survives contact with the enemy,

Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15

Enterprises that use design thinking and user experience (UX) design strategically to delight customers at each step of their interaction with the organization have thrived: research shows companies which apply UX design in this way experience faster growth and higher revenues.2

the flexibility provided by software can, when correctly leveraged, accelerate the innovation cycle.

Limiting initial investment and creating resource scarcity is essential to managing the risk of innovation.

neither intuition nor expert opinion are good gauges of the value our ideas have for users.

The elements of a suitable product-centric paradigm that works at scale have all emerged in the last 10 years, but they have not yet been connected and presented in a systematic way.

In many organizations where automated functional testing is done at all, a common practice is to have a separate team dedicated to the production and maintenance of the test suite. As described at length in Chapter 4, “Implementing a Testing Strategy,” this is a bad idea. The most problematic outcome is that the developers don’t feel as if they own the acceptance tests. As a result, they tend not to pay attention to the failure of this stage of the deployment pipeline, which leads to it being broken for long periods of time. Acceptance tests written without developer involvement also tend to be tightly coupled to the UI and thus brittle and badly factored, because the testers don’t have any insight into the UI’s underlying design and lack the skills to create abstraction layers or run acceptance tests against a public API.

Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

In most enterprises, around 30%–50% of the total time to market is spent on activity which provides almost zero value in terms of mitigating the risks of our investments. This

Acceptance testing relies on the ability to execute automated tests in a productionlike environment. However, a vital property of such a test environment is that it is able to successfully support automated testing. Automated acceptance testing is not the same as user acceptance testing. One of the differences is that automated acceptance tests should not run in an environment that includes integration to all external systems. Instead, your acceptance testing should be focused on providing a controllable environment in which the system under test can be run. “Controllable” in this context means that you are able to create the correct initial state for our tests. Integrating with real external systems removes our ability to do this.

To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.

organization. To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.

The key to creating a lean enterprise is to enable those doing the work to solve their customers’ problems in a way that is aligned with the strategy of the wider

Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.4

We should explore and experiment with radical process changes — known as kaikaku in Lean terminology — in the same way we explore potential new business models. That is, we should try them out with a relatively small, cross-functional part of the organization, with people that fall in the “innovator” category. These people must be interested in the proposed process experiments and have the necessary skills to run them.

In a survey of 161 global business decision makers shown in Figure 2-6, only 24% of respondents reported using an economic model to make investment decisions in products and services. Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

Product people become judged on their ability to create comprehensive specification documents and well-crafted business cases, not on whether the products and features they come up with deliver value to users.

Such programs fail to recognize that turning innovation or change into an event rather than part of our daily work can never produce significant or lasting results.

Don’t slow down delivery. Decide, when needed, at the right level. Do it with the right people. Go see for yourself. Only do it if it adds value. Trust and verify.

Look for obstacles constantly and treat them as opportunities to experiment and learn.

features often fail to deliver the expected value).

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. Edwards Deming

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world…[it is] a result, not a strategy…Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.1 Jack Welch

As discussed in Chapter 2, data gathered from A/B tests by Ronny Kohavi, who directed Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization group before joining Microsoft as General Manager of its Experimentation Platform, reveal that 60%–90% of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to improve. Thus if we’re not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, the chances are that about 2/3 of the work we are doing is of either zero or negative value to our customers — and certainly of negative value to our organization, since this work costs us in three ways. In addition to the cost of developing the features, there is an opportunity cost associated with more valuable work we could have done instead, and the cost of the new complexity they add to our systems (which manifests itself as the cost of maintaining the code, a drag on the rate at which we can develop new functionality, and often, reduced operational stability and performance).

People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker

Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.