Resources

Books, videos, and further reading on continuous delivery and deployment.

6 minute read

This page collects the books, websites, and videos that inform the practices in this migration guide. Resources are organized by topic and annotated with which migration phase they are most relevant to.

Books

Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Delivery Pipelines by Dave Farley: A practical, focused guide to building CD pipelines. Farley covers pipeline design, testing strategies, and deployment patterns in a direct, implementation-oriented style. Start here if you want a concise guide to the pipeline practices in Phase 2.; Most relevant to: Phase 2 – Pipeline
Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley: The foundational text on CD. Published in 2010, it remains the most comprehensive treatment of the principles and practices that make continuous delivery work. Covers version control patterns, build automation, testing strategies, deployment pipelines, and release management. If you read one book before starting your migration, read this one.; Most relevant to: All phases
Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim: Presents the DORA research findings that link technical practices to organizational performance. Covers the four key metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and the capabilities that predict high performance. Essential reading for anyone who needs to make the business case for a CD migration.; Most relevant to: Phase 0 – Assess and Phase 3 – Metrics-Driven Improvement
Engineering the Digital Transformation by Gary Gruver: Addresses the organizational and leadership challenges of large-scale delivery transformation. Gruver draws on his experience leading transformations at HP and other large enterprises. Particularly valuable for leaders sponsoring a migration who need to understand the change management, communication, and sequencing challenges ahead.; Most relevant to: Organizational leadership across all phases
Release It! by Michael T. Nygard: Covers the design and architecture patterns that make production systems resilient. Topics include stability patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, timeouts), deployment patterns, and the operational realities of running software at scale. Essential reading before entering Phase 4, where the team has the capability to deploy any change on demand.; Most relevant to: Phase 4 – Deliver on Demand and Phase 2 – Rollback
The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis: A practical companion to The Phoenix Project. Covers the Three Ways (flow, feedback, and continuous learning) and provides detailed guidance on implementing DevOps practices. Useful as a reference throughout the migration.; Most relevant to: All phases
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford: A novel that illustrates DevOps principles through the story of a fictional IT organization in crisis. Useful for building organizational understanding of why delivery improvement matters, especially for stakeholders who will not read a technical book.; Most relevant to: Building organizational buy-in during Phase 0

Testing

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce: The definitive guide to test-driven development in practice. Goes beyond unit testing to cover acceptance testing, test doubles, and how TDD drives design. Essential reading for Phase 1 testing fundamentals.; Most relevant to: Phase 1 – Testing Fundamentals
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers: Practical techniques for adding tests to untested code, breaking dependencies, and incrementally improving code that was not designed for testability. Indispensable if your migration starts with a codebase that has little or no automated testing.; Most relevant to: Phase 1 – Testing Fundamentals

Work Decomposition and Flow

User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton: A practical guide to breaking features into deliverable increments using story maps. Patton’s approach directly supports the vertical slicing discipline required for small batch delivery.; Most relevant to: Phase 1 – Work Decomposition
The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen: A rigorous treatment of flow economics in product development. Covers queue theory, batch size economics, WIP limits, and the cost of delay. Dense but transformative. Reading this book will change how you think about every aspect of your delivery process.; Most relevant to: Phase 3 – Optimize
Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis: Focuses on identifying and eliminating the “time thieves” that steal productivity: too much WIP, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities, and neglected work. A practical companion to the WIP limiting practices in Phase 3.; Most relevant to: Phase 3 – Limiting WIP

Architecture

Building Microservices by Sam Newman: Covers the architectural patterns that enable independent deployment, including service boundaries, API design, data management, and testing strategies for distributed systems.; Most relevant to: Phase 3 – Architecture Decoupling
Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais: Addresses the relationship between team structure and software architecture (Conway’s Law in practice). Covers team types, interaction modes, and how to evolve team structures to support fast flow. Valuable for addressing the organizational blockers that surface throughout the migration.; Most relevant to: Organizational design across all phases

Websites

MinimumCD.org: Defines the minimum set of practices required to claim you are doing continuous delivery. This migration guide uses the MinimumCD definition as its target state. Start here to understand what CD actually requires.
Dojo Consortium: A community-maintained collection of CD practices, metrics definitions, and improvement patterns. Many of the definitions and frameworks in this guide are adapted from the Dojo Consortium’s work.
DORA (dora.dev): The DevOps Research and Assessment site, which publishes the annual State of DevOps report and provides resources for measuring and improving delivery performance.
Trunk-Based Development: The comprehensive reference for trunk-based development patterns. Covers short-lived feature branches, feature flags, branch by abstraction, and release branching strategies.
Martin Fowler’s blog (martinfowler.com): Martin Fowler’s site contains authoritative articles on continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, refactoring, and software design. Key articles include “Continuous Integration” and “Continuous Delivery.”
Google Cloud Architecture Center – DevOps: Google’s public documentation of the DORA capabilities, including self-assessment tools and implementation guidance.

Videos

“Continuous Delivery” by Dave Farley (YouTube channel): Dave Farley’s YouTube channel provides weekly videos covering CD practices, pipeline design, testing strategies, and software engineering principles. Accessible and practical.; Most relevant to: All phases
“Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble (various conference talks): Jez Humble’s conference presentations cover the principles and research behind CD. His talk “Why Continuous Delivery?” is an excellent introduction for teams and stakeholders who are new to the concept.; Most relevant to: Building understanding during Phase 0
“Refactoring” and “TDD” talks by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck: Foundational talks on the development practices that support CD. Understanding TDD and refactoring is essential for Phase 1 testing fundamentals.; Most relevant to: Phase 1 – Foundations
“The Smallest Thing That Could Possibly Work” by Bryan Finster: Covers the work decomposition and small batch delivery practices that are central to this migration guide. Focuses on practical techniques for breaking work into vertical slices.; Most relevant to: Phase 1 – Work Decomposition and Phase 3 – Small Batches