Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. So one of the recurring themes we talk a lot about

on this podcast is how software changes organizations and vice versa. More broadly, it's really about

how companies, of all kinds, innovate with the org structures and tools that they have.

And today's episode, a rerun of a very popular episode from a couple years ago,

draws on actual research and data from one of the largest large-scale studies of software

and organizational performance out there. Joining me in this conversation are two of the authors of

the book Accelerate, The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Foresin, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim.

We have the first two authors, so Nicole, who did her PhD research trying to answer the

elusive eternal questions around how to measure software performance in orgs, especially given

past debates, around does IT matter? She was a co-founder and CEO of Dora, which put out the annual state of

DevOps report. Dora was acquired by Google Cloud a little over a year ago, and she will soon be

joining GitHub as VP of Research and Strategy. And then we also have Jez Humble, who is CTO at Dora,

is currently in developer relations at Google Cloud, and is also the co-author

of the books, The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and Continuous Delivery. In the conversation that

follows, Nicole and Jez share their findings about high-performing companies, even those that

may not think their tech companies, and answer my questions about whether there's

an ideal org type for this kind of innovation, whether it's the size of the organization,

the software architecture they use, their culture or people, and where the role of software

and IT lives within that. But first, we begin by talking briefly about the history of DevOps

and where that fits in the

broader landscape of related software movements.

So I started as a software engineer at IBM.

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