Accelerate Successful Teams And Destroying Software
Hey, Luca here, welcome to a weekly edition of the💡 Monday Ideas 💡 from Refactoring! To access all our articles, library, and community, subscribe to the full version: Resources: 🏛️ Library • 💬 Community • 🎙️ Podcast • ❓ About 🎨 Brought to you by Atono!This free email is brought to you by today’s sponsor, Atono!
You can learn more about Atono below 👇 1) 📗 Accelerate ≠ DORA metricsA few months ago we read Accelerate in our community book club. This is the seminal book about measuring software delivery, which gave origin to the famous DORA metrics.
However, Accelerate is about much more than metrics. The research explored what capabilities across culture, process, and technology, make engineering teams successful, and here are my favorite findings:
You can find our full review below:  2) 🏆 Successful teams do three things rightSpeaking of successful engineering teams, we did our own research early this year to figure out how teams work and what practices lead more likely to successful outcomes. We ran a thorough survey and published our findings after a few weeks. Out of all the questions we asked, there are three we are particularly fond of:
These are the elements that correlate the strongest with the highest number of positive behaviors. That is: the gradient of answers for these questions is most likely to be matched by a similar gradient in other behaviors 👇
Some examples (see the picture for more):
So, the first two questions are strictly qualitative and collect the opinions of both technical and non-technical stakeholders. We believe these are extremely important: in fact, most quantitative practices (e.g. how often you ship, how much time is spent on KTLO, …) depend on the team’s context and do not decisively sort good teams from bad ones. Conversely, we would be hard-pressed to find low performing teams where all stakeholders—engineers, managers, and leadership—are happy. The last question is about predictability. We found that shipping on time correlates strongly with most good behaviors we polled for. By most measures, predictable shipping is even more important than frequent shipping. So, what kind of traits are exhibited by teams that ship on time and where stakeholders are happy? You can find the full report below 👇 3) 💣 We are destroying softwareI keep thinking about the interview we did a few months ago with Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis and one of the most successful open source authors of all time. During the interview, Salvatore delivered a strong critique of unnecessary complexity in modern software, particularly targeting large tech companies: "Big entities like Google cannot design good things. They did a terrible job with HTTP, and with new protocols. For small gains, there are huge complexity gains that make the web less accessible, less comfortable." He argues that the root causes of this complexity are:
He also explained how web development became unnecessarily complex: "Framework after framework the web became slower and more complicated. And it's the same web forms, buttons and listings... 20 years ago was the same. But it was a much simpler stack. It was faster with slower computers." Salvatore sees this as a difficult cycle to break because developers need to learn these complex technologies to remain employable, even though they recognize the inefficiency. Here is the full interview with Salvatore:  You can also find it on 🎧 Spotify and 📬 Substack And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these: 1) 🔒 Subscribe to the full version — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 1700+ engineers and managers have joined already! Learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here. 2) 📣 Advertise with us — we are always looking for great products that we can recommend to our readers. If you are interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers, and engineers, you may want to advertise with us 👇 If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! I wish you a great week! ☀️ Luca
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