Folks, the State of DevOps Survey closed June 8th. If you haven’t yet, please click this link: https://bit.ly/2FCG8Me  I just reread the results from prior years in Accelerate and I was struck by the findings in Chapter 5.

The differences in velocity among high, medium- and low-performers are well known and I commented on these before. I forgot that there are interesting findings that architecture is important in achieving high performance. In the 2017 survey, the biggest contributor to continuous delivery was whether teams can:

• Make large-scale changes to the design of their system without the permission of somebody outside the team
• Make large-scale changes to the design of their system without depending on other teams to make changes in their systems or creating significant work for other teams
• Complete their work without communicating and coordinating with people outside their team
• Deploy and release their product or service on demand, regardless of other services it depends upon
• Do most of their testing on demand, without requiring an integrated test environment
• Perform deployments during normal business hours with negligible downtime

These attributes held true, regardless of whether the team was working on new systems, systems of engagement, systems of record, mainframes, packaged software, or embedded systems.

It’s a great reminder that building and designing systems to last matters. Please share your experiences in this year’s survey. Thanks.