I recently read Dr. Deming’s “The New Economics”. The book introduces what Dr. Deming calls “The system of Profound Knowledge”. It’s a four part theory for understanding and improving systems. Understanding variation is one part of the system of profound knowledge. You see, variation is a natural trait of life and in systems. I we implicitly understand this. Deming explains how this implicit understanding becomes an explicit aspect of improving systems.

SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs create a hierarchy. They measure reliability and create an objective framework for prioritization and decision making.

The pre-commit prevents known bad commits from entering the deployment pipeline. Use it as tool to improve percent-complete-percent-accurate in your deployment pipeline.

Preflight checks prevent deploys into known bad conditions

The four types of work–features, defects, debts, and risks–under pin the Flow Framework

The 12 factor app sets guidelines for designing software for deployment pipelines. They’re a great starting point that can be improved upon.

A look into into how fostering a culture of experimentation and learning drive continuous improvement. This is known as the Third Way of DevOps.

The Principle of Feedback, or the second way of DevOps, describes using right to left feedback in the value stream.

A look into the Principle of Flow which calls for fast feedback cycles from development to production.