Where to Start with Jez Humble
Jez Humble is a software engineer, author, and one of the key figures behind the DevOps and continuous delivery movements. He co-authored “Continuous Delivery” (2010) with David Farley, the Jolt Award-winning book that defined the practice of building deployment pipelines to make software releases reliable and repeatable. He went on to co-author “The DevOps Handbook” (2016) with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, and John Willis, and “Accelerate” (2018) with Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim, which won the Shingo Publication Award. Humble has worked at ThoughtWorks, served as a VP at Chef Software, and worked at Google Cloud and the US Digital Service. He also teaches at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. His work focuses on the intersection of engineering practice and organizational performance, using evidence and measurement to show what actually makes software teams effective.
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Continuous Delivery
Jez Humble & David Farley · 463 pages · 2010 · Challenging
Themes: continuous delivery, deployment pipelines, automated testing, build automation, release engineering
The foundational technical guide to building deployment pipelines that make software releases reliable, repeatable, and low-risk. Humble and Farley introduce the deployment pipeline concept and show how to automate every step from code commit to production release.
Why Start Here
Continuous Delivery is Humble’s most original and influential work. While Accelerate and The DevOps Handbook were collaborative efforts with other prominent authors, Continuous Delivery is where Humble (with co-author David Farley) first articulated the ideas that would reshape how the industry thinks about software releases. The book argues that every software change should be releasable at any time, and it lays out in detail the technical practices that make this possible.
Published in 2010, the book predates the DevOps movement’s mainstream breakthrough and helped create the intellectual foundation for it. The deployment pipeline pattern it describes, automating the path from version control to production through build, test, and release stages, is now standard practice in the industry. Winner of the 2011 Jolt Excellence Award.
What to Expect
A 463-page technical book that covers configuration management, build automation, testing strategies, deployment pipelines, and release management. The writing is clear but assumes familiarity with software development. This is a book for practitioners who want to understand and implement continuous delivery at a deep level.