Assertion Supported
Humble: High-performing tech teams do not trade speed for stability
“High-performing companies don't make those trade-offs. They're not going fast and breaking things. They're going fast and making more stable, more high-quality And this is one of the key results in the book, in our research, is this fact that high performers d…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Humble: US tech firms should fear competitive threat from Tencent and Alibaba
“I think U.S. Companies should be scared because the moment Tencent and Alibaba are already moving into other developing markets and they're going to be incredibly competitive because it's just built into their DNA.”
Assertion Supported
Humble: Microservices and Kubernetes do not guarantee high IT performance
“Implementing those technologies does not give you those outcomes we talked about. We actually looked at people doing mainframe stuff. You can achieve these results with mainframes. Equally, you can use the, you know, Kubernetes and, you know, Docker and micros…”
Insight
Humble: Agile hits a brick wall in large, complex organizations
“If you're working in a large, complex organization, Agile's going to hit a brick wall, because unlike the things we were building in the sixties, product development means that things are changing and evolving all the time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Humble: Amazon wins because competitors cannot copy its continuous production experiments
“They're running hundreds of experiments in production at any one time to improve the product, and that's not something that anyone else can copy. That's why Amazon keeps winning.”
Insight
Humble: Never use Agile story points as a productivity measure
“You should never use story points as a productivity measure.”
Insight
Humble: Measure software performance by lead time, frequency, MTTR, and fail rate
“So this is why we like two things in particular. One thing, that it's a global measure, and secondly, that it's not just one thing, it mixes two things together, which might normally be intention. And so this is why we went for Our measure of performance. So m…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Humble: Mission-Driven Companies Outperform Those Focused Solely on Profit
“In fact, as we know from research, companies that don't have a mission other than making money do less well than the ones that do.”
Assertion Supported
Humble: High Software Performers Outperform Low Performers by 2x
“But I think, again, what the data shows is that Companies that do well on the performance measures we talked about outperform their low performing peers by a factor of two.”
Assertion Supported
Humble: Team autonomy without dependencies is a top predictor of IT performance
“That is one of the biggest predictors in our cohort of IT performance is the ability of teams to get stuff done on their own without dependencies on other teams, whether that's testing, or whether it's deploying, or whether it's planning.”
Assertion Supported
Humble: Research proves culture predictively drives tech and business performance
“And in fact, we measure it in our work, and we can show that culture has a predictive effect on organizational outcomes and on technology capabilities.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jez Humble: DevOps emerged to solve scale challenges pioneered by Amazon and Google
“And I think from a historical point of view, the best way to think about DevOps, it's a bunch of people who had to solve this problem of how do we build large distributed systems that were secure and scalable and be able to change them really rapidly and evolv…”
Insight
Humble: Phased software development fails when user needs are unpredictable
“When we're building products and services where particularly We don't know what customers actually want and what users actually want. It doesn't make sense to do that, because you'll build something that no one wants. You can't predict.”
Assertion Supported
Humble: Toyota won by making higher quality cars faster
“Okay, so I've got, so Toyota didn't win by making shitty cars faster. They won by making higher quality cars faster and having shorter time to market.”
Insight
Humble: Software Teams Should Focus on Recovery Rather Than Preventing Failure
“We accept that failure is inevitable because we're building complex systems. So, not how do we prevent failure, but when failure inevitably occurs, how quickly can we detect and fix it?”
Insight
Humble: Lines of code cannot measure developer productivity
“But lines of code have all these drawbacks. We can't use them as a measure of productivity.”
Insight
Humble: DevOps Is the Technological Basis for Lean Startup Methodology
“So to sum up, the way you can frame this is DevOps is that technological capability that underpins your ability to practice lean startup and all these very rapid iterative processes.”
Insight
Humble: Software engineering first principles do not change every few years
“And the first principles, I mean, they will change over the course of centuries. I mean, we've got modern management versus kind of scientific management, but they don't change over the course of like a couple of years. The principles are still the same. Techn…”
Insight
Humble: Reasoning about cause and effect requires working in small batches
“So the same thing is true of organizational change in process and product development as well, by the way, which is working in small batches so that you can actually reason about cause and effects. You know, I changed this thing. It had this effect. Again, tha…”
Insight
Humble: Psychological safety during failures is required for innovation
“If people don't feel that when things go wrong, they're going to be supported, they're not going to take risks. And then you're not going to get any novelty because novelty by definition involves taking risks.”
