The Manager's Guide to Continuous Delivery by Andrew Phillips et al

“The Manager's Guide to Continuous Delivery” is what it sounds like. A nice short introduction to CD for managers. All of the authors and reviews of the book work for Xebia Labs, but the book isn't a commercial. In fact, they don't even mention Xebia outside of the authors bios and acknowledgements.

I'm not a manager and I've read Jez Humble and David Farley's full length CD book. So I'm way overqualified for this book. As an aside, David Farley wrote one of the forewords to this book.

The forewords are excellent covering Scrum and CD. The glossary looks really useful as well if one is new to CD.. The first two chapters compare a waterfall and agile company highlight waste and the differences. Later chapters cover basics concepts and keywords such as what makes a good regression test and canary releases.

Note that this book is short. There are 83 numbered pages. Six are blank (chapter dividers and pre/post pages.) Three are the title page/copyright/table of contents. There are about the authors/acknowledgments. And thirteen are the title pages for each chapter which have a few sentence of text each. The point being of the 83 pages, there's 61-74 pages of content depending on how you count.

The book has four authors but reads like it was written by one person. That's particularly impressive. The book is easy to read. It's even hardcover so nice and robust.

Given this book only costs a few dollars, the shortness is fine. I think it is a great book for a manager to get the lay of the land on why agile and CD matter.  Remember to read a more detailed book instead if you are a practitioner.

I give this book 8 out of 10 horseshoes.