Curated Reading List on DevOps, Software Delivery Performance, and Engineering Productivity

1. Google releases the 2021 DevOps Report – A brief summary of the DORA 2021 DevOps report, confirming the four original performance metrics and adding a fifth metric: from Availability to Reliability.

2. Consistency – The Essential Path to R&D Efficiency (Long Read) – A record of Qiao Liang’s talk at Tencent CI Day, introducing the view that software efficiency is fundamentally a scaling problem and that consistency is the necessary path.

3. Performance Metrics and Engineer Culture – A sister piece to the Tencent CI Day talk, discussing the relationship between performance measurement and engineering culture.

4. Basic Working Principles for Improving R&D Efficiency – Outlines four core principles for software product teams to boost R&D efficiency, emphasizing the speed of the “fast verification loop” and the size of the Minimum Viable Solution.

5. Microsoft: Shift-Left Testing for Faster, More Reliable Delivery – Describes Microsoft’s admission that its previous quality assurance model was inadequate and how the cloud era demands a more efficient working mode.

6. Micro Feedback Loops to Maximize Developer Efficiency – Introduces a framework for maximizing developer efficiency through frequent micro‑feedback loops executed hundreds of times per day.

7. How Google Handles Releases – Details Google Ads team’s weekly release process, highlighting the pressure of frequent releases and the limited time for reflection.

8. How Google Measures Engineering Productivity – Explains Google’s view that improving productivity incurs cost, and stresses the need for effective, not just increased, engineering productivity.

9. Google PH Value: Health Metrics for Software Projects – Discusses SRE’s user‑centric approach to defining SLOs and building health metrics for continuously running services.

10. Microsoft: Shift‑Right Testing (TIP) – Introduces Microsoft’s Test‑In‑Production (TIP) practice, acknowledging that commercial success had masked shortcomings in their testing methodology.