DevOps Handbook

Companion Guide

How knowledge sharing helps

organizations follow the Three
Ways of DevOps
Overview of the 

DevOps Handbook
Now in its second edition, The DevOps Handbook has provided
countless organizations and practitioners with the theory,
principles, and practices to help companies realize the benefits
of successful DevOps initiatives. Since its publication in 2016,
the handbook has sold a quarter of a million copies and been
translated into 11 languages. Coauthors Gene Kim, Jez Humble,
Patrick DeBois, John Willis, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD, provide
compelling guidance and case studies to demonstrate how
real-world companies are executing and benefiting from
DevOps adoption.

In this unofficial companion guide, we’ll explore what’s new in

the second edition and how the right approach to knowledge
sharing and collaboration can support the Three Ways of
DevOps and enhance business outcomes. We also sat down
with coauthor Gene Kim to talk about platforms that support
DevOps projects and improve developer experience and
performance.

With more than 90% of IT organizations exploring or

implementing DevOps projects to accelerate solutions delivery,
plenty of organizations are looking for developer-first platforms
that can support DevOps. Keep in mind that this companion
guide doesn’t address every chapter of the handbook, and it’s
not a replacement for the handbook: it’s a closer look at how
the right developer-focused platform can help organizations
fulfill the promise of the Three Ways of DevOps.

Gene Kim

Coauthor, The DevOps Handbook

02
What's new in the

second edition?
The updated and expanded edition of The DevOps 

Handbook includes:
15 new case studies to illustrate DevOps principles and
practices in real-world contexts, from Adidas and Fannie
Mae to American Airlines and the US Air Force

A new foreword and research from Dr. Nicole Forsgren,

Partner at Microsoft Research, Head of the Developer
Velocity Lab, and a lead researcher on the State of 

DevOps Reports

Updates to the main text where new research, findings,

and experiences have shaped how DevOps is understood
and implemented

New resource sections following each chapter to guide

further learning

Updated afterwords from each coauthor

03
The Three Ways of DevOps
The DevOps Handbook refers to the principles underpinning
DevOps as the Three Ways: Flow, Feedback, and Continual
Learning and Experimentation.

Throughout this companion guide, we will highlight how

continual learning cultures and knowledge sharing provide
the foundation for strengthening your DevOps practice. Now,
let’s explore the DevOps Handbook.

The First Way: 


The principles of flow

The First Way of DevOps is concerned with flow: “the fast and
smooth flow of work from Development to Operations in order
to deliver value to customers quickly” (The DevOps Handbook,
p. 19). Improving flow by making work visible and building
processes that keep defects from being passed along to
downstream work centers is crucial to achieving

DevOps outcomes.

Go with the flow

Developers often talk about being in the flow, meaning to be

focused on complex cognitive work without being interrupted
by distractions or the need to context-switch. Context-
switching can be a result of attempting to multitask on too
many projects, interruptions from texts, instant messaging,
email alerts, or “shoulder-tapping” from coworkers .

Interruptions are a nuisance for technology workers. Although

the immediate consequences of these distractions may be
invisible, their cumulative impact on productivity can be
enormous (p. 21).

04
 As we’ve added more collaboration tools that come with higher
expectations for an immediate response, it’s become harder to
achieve a state of flow. Kim acknowledges that interruptions
Did you know?

from email and chat platforms effectively form “this hyperactive

Employees lose 23
minutes every time hive mind, where it’s really almost impossible to get into a
they are interrupted. sense of flow.” We might think of the First Way of DevOps as an
Source: Fast Company, 2008 organization-wide state of flow, in which tasks and information
flow quickly and without friction from development to
operations.

As You Prepare to Implement the First Way, Ask Yourself:

Where and how are your teams being taken out of their
flow state?

Can you see the ripple effects of this in your efficiency

and productivity metrics?

Make work visible

DevOps success depends on an organization’s ability to make

How does your team
the technology value stream visible: to see where work is flowing
spend time?

Regardless of what time without friction and where it’s piling up or stalling out.

or project tracking system

you use, it’s important to Many teams use visual aids like kanban boards or sprint
track both actual, planning boards, both physical and virtual, to overcome this
uninterrupted hours you hurdle.

spend on projects and

other tasks like meetings
and emails that may be
interrupting focus. In trying to uncover “invisible work,” ask yourself:

Are you scheduling 100% of everyone's time? Is there

any buffer in the time estimates to account for
unexpected non-hands on keyboard time?

Can you see which people are unofficial helpers with

other projects, because they are either subject matter
experts or because they are highly tenured?

Can you see which people are struggling and might need
more help or time?

05
Reduce handoffs with self-service platforms

The First Way also calls for reducing the number of handoffs
necessary to move code through the technology value
stream. With multiple departments and stakeholders at work
on everything from functional and integration testing to
environment creation, server and storage administration,
security, and more, the number of handoffs—and, thus, the
potential for errors—can quickly get out of hand.

Every team involved represents another opportunity where

communication might break down or the flow of work might
be interrupted. Some knowledge, inevitably, is lost with
every handoff, so that over time people working on the
problem can lose sight of crucial context or what strategic
goal the work supports. To add to the complexity and
confusion, various teams probably use different systems for
ticketing, project management, documentation, and
communication.

DevOps principles recommend that organizations manage

these problems by reducing the number of handoffs involved
in each project. This isn’t a one-step process: it requires
organizations to build platforms and restructure teams in
such a way that engineers can self-service instead of
depending on other people for building, testing, and
deploying software.

To streamline handoffs and reduce friction, ask yourself:

Where are your communication or knowledge

breakdown points?

Can you think of an example of when crucial context was

lost because of loosely structured handoffs? 

What was the impact on the individuals on your team?
What was the impact on the business?

06
Putting the First Way into practice

1. Reduce distractions and interruptions that pull DevOps

team members out of their flow.

2. Improve the visibility of work to eliminate hardships in the

value stream, including time required to research, locate,
or recreate solutions others have already reached.

3. Reduce knowledge loss caused by unnecessary handoffs.

A common knowledge base, like Stack Overflow for Teams,

reduces context switching for both knowledge seekers and
the experts throughout your organization. Look for
integrations with other collaboration tools that your teams
use to increase engagement without taking them out of
their workflow. For example, chat integrations with Slack
and Microsoft Teams allow people to search for solutions,
ask questions and provide answers without switching apps.

07
The Second Way: 


The principles of feedback

The principles of the First Way enable the rapid flow of work
from left (development) to right (operations), while the
principles of the Second Way focus on creating fast, reciprocal,
constant feedback from right to left. The goal is to create a safer
and more resilient work system. Absent or lacking feedback
leads to poor outcomes: missed opportunities to spot and fix
problems before they damage the business. In our
conversation, Kim put it more plainly: “Learning without
feedback is flipping impossible.”

Better feedback leads to better outcomes

The Second Way of DevOps recommends that organizations

“shorten and amplify feedback loops” so teams can see
problems as they happen and share that insight with everyone
in the value stream (p. 223). This approach allows teams to
identify and mitigate problems early in the SDLC—with luck,
well before a catastrophic incident like the Knight Capital
failure.

Moreover, the Second Way requires building a work system in

which knowledge acquired downstream in operations is
integrated into the upstream work of developers and product
managers. This is how problems, potential issues, and
revealing patterns lead to learning and improvements.

The handbook recommends that DevOps-minded

organizations “create a process that allows everyone to get
feedback on their work” and “makes information visible to
enable learning” (p. 223).

08
 Assess how well you’re overcoming silos

What metrics should organizations consider when evaluating

how effectively they’re eliminating silos? Kim recommends
focusing on code deployment lead time, which
simultaneously predicts how effectively your team can build/
test/deploy and how quickly developers can get feedback to
improve code quality.

“Code deployment lead time is a great proxy for many

things,” says Kim, “but especially for ineffective silos,
because if a code deployment has to span 20-30 different
“Code deployment lead silos, of which if anything goes wrong it might take add
time is a great proxy for
another week, you’re looking at code deployment lead times
many things”
measured in months.” Kim calls this metric “one of the best
Gene Kim
measures and indicators that every technology organization
needs to focus on. Are developers getting feedback within
seconds or minutes or, worst case, hours…or are they
discovering the error only nine months later during
integration testing, where cause and effect has basically
vanished?”

Swarm to solve problems and build more

knowledge

Part of the process of shortening and amplifying feedback

loops to maximize opportunities for improvement involves
“swarming” issues to fix them immediately, rather than
creating workarounds or waiting to solve the problem. 

The goal of swarming is to contain problems before they
have a chance to spread, and to diagnose and treat the
problem so it cannot recur.

The handbook cites the famous Toyota Andon cord as the 


ur-example of swarming: “In a Toyota manufacturing plant,
above every work center is a cord that every worker and
manager is trained to pull when something goes wrong 

[a defective or missing part or a delay in completing a task].
When the Andon cord is pulled, the team leader is alerted
and immediately works to resolve the problem.”

09
If the problem can’t be resolved in a short, specified time
window, the entire production line is stopped so that
everyone can focus on fixing the problem.

Swarming might seem to contradict common management

wisdom, which dictates that local problems should not
disrupt global operations. But swarming is crucial to enabling
the Second Way of DevOps because it enables learning.
Swarming “prevents the loss of critical information due to
fading memories or changing circumstances. This is especially
critical in complex systems, where many problems occur
because of some unexpected, idiosyncratic interaction of
people, processes, products, places, and circumstances”

(p. 38). As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to
reconstruct exactly what was happening when the problem
arose—whereas swarming freezes the problem in time so that
it can be examined in its full context.

The physical Andon cords used by Toytoa don’t help remote

and hybrid teams very much, but there are virtual versions of
raising your hand and saying “help” before an issue becomes
a catastrophe. Intelligent swarming means getting the people
who are best-qualified to solve the issue working on the issue
as soon as possible—wherever they are located. In this model,
the person who takes ownership of the issue often owns it
until it’s fully resolved. They may well solicit help and
feedback from others in the process, but they won’t escalate
the problem to somebody else and forget about it.

Ask Yourself:

Have you had a time when teams needed to swarm to

solve an idiosyncratic interaction or another complex
challenge? Where did you capture the learnings and
outcomes for the future?

How are you making lessons learned from problems

being solved discoverable?

10
 Putting the Second Way into practice

What is an Allen Curve?

1. Build feedback loops that integrate downstream learning

into earlier development.

The Allen Curve is a


graphical representation
that reveals the ponential
2. Empower employees to quickly get the assistance they
need, from peers and experts throughout the company.
drop in frequency of
communication between
engineers as the distance
3. Look for ways to build connections across remote and
hybrid teams to flatten the Allen Curve.
between them increases.
It was discovered by
The right knowledge sharing and collaboration solutions
Massachusetts Institute

of Technology Professor can facilitate feedback on approaches before they’re
Thomas J. Allen in the
 implemented, and connect colleagues with upstream and
late 1970s. downstream stakeholders.

11
The Third Way: 


The principles of continual

learning and
experimentation

The Third Way is a set of principles and practices designed to

build a culture of continual learning, experimentation, and
improvement. Fostering a dynamic learning culture helps
organizations create valuable products and solutions more
quickly.

Empowering individuals to discover and share knowledge

allows teams throughout the organization to benefit from those
individually obtained insights. Simply put, one person or one
team might have discovered or designed a solution to a
problem that also plagues others throughout the organization—
but if that knowledge can’t be captured and disseminated, its
value is limited.

As many organizations have shifted to working remotely,

managing knowledge has become both more challenging and
more crucial.

The handbook lays out three practices that organizations

should implement as part of the Third Way:

Enable and inject learning into daily work

Convert local discoveries into global improvements

Reserve time to create organizational learning and

improvement

12
 Enable and inject learning into daily work

The DevOps Handbook emphasizes that organizations in the

technology value stream should strive “to create a high-trust
culture, reinforcing that we are all lifelong learners who must
take smart risks in our daily work” (p. 45). When individuals,
teams, and organizations are encouraged to learn from their
mistakes as well as their triumphs, it’s easier to identify and
reinforce great, workable solutions.

Kim emphasizes that the best way to succeed in a competitive

market is to out-learn and out-experiment everybody else,
acquiring more knowledge in the service of delivering more
“The only way to win in
the marketplace is by value to customers, more quickly. “The only way to win in the
out-learning the marketplace is by out-learning the competition,” Kim says,
competition,” referencing a quote from systems scientist Peter Senge,
Gene Kim author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization (2006). “That means you learn faster
and you learn more.”

Ask Yourself:

How are you enabling your team to learn every day?

What's the risk to your business if the competition is out-

learning you?

Do you know how your teams prefer to learn? What are

they learning in their spare time, away from work?

13
Dynamic learning equals resiliency

Complex systems require self-diagnostics and self-improvement

to stay responsive, reliable, and resilient. When it comes to
complex systems, it’s impossible to predict every possible
outcome of each action we might take. Of course, static tools like
checklists and runbooks help to structure our understanding of
complex systems, but unexpected, potentially catastrophic
accidents remain a possibility.

To work safely and effectively within complex systems,

organizations need to embrace a learning system that empowers
organizations to understand their mistakes and turn that hard-
won insight into improvements that keep problems from
recurring. One of the significant advantages of resilient
organizations is that coworkers can learn from others’ missteps,
borrow and adapt their solutions, and build in optimizations that
avoid triggering the same problems in the future. When someone
comes up with an elegant, eminently workable solution, future
folks can find that solution immediately, as soon as they
encounter the need.

Making solutions accessible and implementing systems to capture

individual knowledge as it’s produced is an important step toward
building resiliency into your organization. Again, working within a
complex system requires constant self-diagnostics and self-
improvement, areas that allow us to detect and fix problems, then
translate those solutions to organization-wide issues.
Organizations that develop the ability to detect and solve
problems—and make those solutions available throughout the
community—are resilient, capable not only of solving problems
but of using them to improve performance across the board.

One key to developing organizational resilience is making

problem-solving and crisis response a habitual part of the culture.

14
 Ask Yourself:

Do you consider your team to be resilient? What's

preventing them from being resilient?

How do you normalize troubleshooting, problem-

solving, and mistake-making so that recognizing and
responding to crises becomes habitual?

Convert local discoveries into global improvements

Resilient organizations need to be able to find local solutions

and translate them into global improvements. Teams with
resilient, high-trust cultures can translate local learnings into
global improvements.

Dr. Ron Westrum, an expert on organizational culture,

performance, and safety, observed that, with healthcare
organizations, a “generative” culture was a top predictor of
patient safety: “Generative organizations are characterized by
actively seeking and sharing information to better enable the
organization to achieve its mission. Responsibilities are
shared throughout the value stream, and failure results in
reflection and genuine inquiry” (pp. 47-48). The same holds
true for technology companies: “a high-trust, generative
culture also predicted software delivery and organizational
performance in technology value streams” (p. 48).

15
 Improve culture to boost morale and retention

Global improvements don’t just have a positive impact on your

bottom line; they also contribute to higher job satisfaction and
lower burnout rates among your employees. As The DevOps
Handbook puts it, “Continual learning and experimentation do
more than just improve the performance of our systems. These
practices also create an inspiring, rewarding workplace where
we are excited to work and collaborate with our peers” (p. 46).

Research from the State of DevOps Report reveals that people

who work at companies that implement Third Way practices are
more than twice as likely to recommend their organization to
How does
friends, report higher job satisfaction, and experience lower
psychological safety
enable high performing levels of burnout. Citing McKinsey research, the handbook also
teams? reports that “culture—which includes psychological safety,
collaboration, and practicing continuous improvement—is a key
Learn more
driver of developer velocity and organizational value” (p. 46).

Against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, many

organizations are asking themselves what they can do, beyond
straightforward comp adjustments, to attract and retain the
best development talent. One clear step is to invest in solutions
to build a gratifying, generative, knowledge-obsessed culture.

Reserve time to foster organizational learning and

improvement

The DevOps Handbook emphasizes that creating a culture of

continual learning, experimentation, and improvement requires
not just buy-in from leadership but also leadership’s
commitment to prioritizing learning and creative problem-
solving. Great teams and organizations don’t grow out of leaders
who make all the right decisions, every time. Instead, a leader’s
role is to create the conditions that will allow their teams

to excel.

16
Says Kim, “It’s incumbent on leaders, especially in the age of the
Great Resignation, to really unleash the creativity and the full
potential of their teams, where everyone is bringing their best to
work. They feel engaged. It challenges them. They get an intrinsic
sense of reward out of the work…leaders have a great deal to do
with to what degree members on the team feel that, and if you
don’t have that, there’s not a lot keeping you there.” Developers,
like all employees, vote with their feet, and if they’re not happy,
they’ll join the millions of other people walking away from their
old jobs.

Kim says that leaders must state clearly that learning is valuable—
and walk the walk. One, freely sharing knowledge, tools, and
troubleshooting techniques demonstrates that learning is a core
principle of your organization. “Two,” says Kim, “it’s super handy
to be able to pick up tips and tricks from others. That means
learnings are not just local and trapped to the person, to the team,
whatever. Instead, [knowledge] really should be radiated out as
quickly and widely out as possible. Better yet, if it’s so good, then
it actually gets embedded in the tools you use so that you don’t…
require a workaround all the time.”

Choosing the right strategy for continual learning 


and knowledge sharing

A culture of continual learning and knowledge sharing doesn’t

happen accidentally. It needs the wholehearted support and
careful attention of leadership, along with enabling platforms that
remove barriers between knowledge seekers and experts.

17
 Empower developers with platforms that prioritize
their needs

Platforms tailored to developers’ needs allow them to be more

productive, focused, and happier in their work. “Platforms for
developers are so important,” explains Kim, because they “allow
“Platforms for developers to be productive, to focus on what needs to be done…
developers are so
platforms are all about removing toil, simplifying how much of the
important”
world [developers] actually need to understand to do what they
Gene Kim
do.” Protected from what Kim calls “the idiosyncrasies of the real
world,” insulated from distraction, developers are better-equipped
to do their jobs—and more likely to be happy doing them.

The right platforms support the developer experience, which is a

top concern for developers evaluating new job prospects in the
midst of the Great Resignation. In Stack Overflow’s pulse survey of
more than 500 developers, more than 53% said prioritizing the
developer experience makes a current or future employer more
attractive. Salary transparency was the second-highest priority
(41%), while 40% wanted opportunities to learn from people
outside of their team. Thirty-five percent prioritized a structured
onboarding experience, and 33% wanted their employer to make
it easy to identify experts within the company.

Pick a solution that transcends silos

Most of us in tech have encountered the frustration and

communication breakdown that can occur when teams use
radically different tools, languages, and terminologies. For an
organization to reap the rewards of a continual learning culture,
seeking and sharing knowledge can’t be ineffective or
burdensome. That’s why a developer platform that doesn’t offer
knowledge portability won’t solve your problems.

“You want portability between teams,” Kim explains. “You want

enough uniformity in tools and norms so that you can switch
between teams somewhat easily. The opposite is when everything
is so idiosyncratic that just because you work on one team in an
organization doesn’t mean you know anything about what it
would take to work on another team.”

18
Conway’s law states that an organization’s design system will mirror
its communication structure. This law informs a core value within
DevOps: that architecture is a top predictor of performance. Says
Kim, “One of the most amazing discoveries to me in the State of
DevOps research was to what extent architecture is one of the top
predictors of performance.” He measures performance as 

“to what degree can a team independently…develop, test, and
deploy value to customers, to what degree can they do their work
without a lot of fine-grained communication coordination with
people outside the team, to what degree can they deploy their
service on demand, even independent of services it depends upon.”

As the number of functionalities increases, so does the need for

cross-team collaboration that transcends silos. Enabling this
collaboration and communication becomes a key mandate for
leaders.

Ask Yourself:

Are feedback and handoff knowledge part of your

developer platform?

Has scaling technical teams created new knowledge

silos?

Are you capturing new learnings from each launch, and

sharing those with less experienced team members?

Putting the Third Way into practice

1. Create an environment that provides daily learning

opportunities.

2. Build a culture of psychological safety where employees

feel safe making mistakes, learning from them, and sharing
their experiences so the whole organization can learn.

3. Commit to prioritizing learning time for your teams.

4. “Enable every new learning to be incorporated into the

collective knowledge of the organization” (p. 334).

19
 Appendix A:


How a knowledge sharing

platform enables the

Three Ways

Stack Overflow for Teams is a developer-first knowledge sharing

and collaboration platform that integrates with development
and engineering workflows to support DevOps projects.

In line with the Three Ways, Stack Overflow for Teams enables:

The fast, seamless flow of work from development to

operations, in order to deliver more value to customers (The
First Way)

Rapid feedback to increase software quality, reliability, and

safety (The Second Way)

The continual creation of individual and collective knowledge

to produce value more quickly and cheaply (The Third Way)

Suggested reading/viewing:

We already use Stack Overflow's public site. Why do we

need Stack Overflow for Teams?

Stack Overflow Vs Stack Overflow for Teams - What's the

difference?

Help your teams stay in their flow for better

business outcomes

The high cost of context-switching is one of the reasons

organizations are looking for platforms that help developers
locate knowledge quickly, without having to interrupt their
colleagues. Because 82% of developers already work with a
tab open to Stack Overflow’s public platform, it’s the natural
place to get their questions answered quickly with minimal
disruption or application switching.
20
Stack Overflow for Teams’ common knowledge base reduces
context switching for both knowledge seekers and the experts
who are documenting solutions. In addition, chat integrations for
platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams allow people to ask
questions and provide answers without switching apps.

It can be hard to visualize the often-invisible costs of frequent

interruptions to search for knowledge, but Stack Overflow for
Teams can help.

Case Study: Progressive Insurance visualizes knowledge

flows between teams.

In a recent webinar, members of Progressive’s Open Source

Office described how they leveraged the flexible API from
Stack Overflow for Teams to visualize how knowledge flows
between departments and gain more insight into trending
questions, topics, and concerns. “The immediate story that
[Stack Overflow for Teams] told us, right after we made it go
live, was that we were already breaking down the walls
between our domains in terms of communication,” said
Open Source Developer Advocate Michael “d00d” Parkins.

As a self-service knowledge management platform, Stack

Overflow for Teams helps organizations reduce knowledge loss or
avoid it entirely by capturing individual learnings and radiating
this knowledge throughout the organization. The platform makes
knowledge easily accessible to people seeking the same
information in the future and embeds the best solutions in the
tools developers use every day.

Case Study: At Expensify, Stack Overflow for Teams gives

developers the confidence to work on any project.

“It gives an open opportunity to everyone who has the

knowledge to share it,” said software engineer Ira Praharaj.
Engineers across the company estimated they were saving
between two and three hours a week that had previously
been devoted to hunting down information they needed.

21
Increase software quality, reliability, and safety

Stack Overflow for Teams helps organizations enable fast

feedback and feedforward loops across departments. The
transparent and easy to discover knowledge sharing format is
visible to all departments and invites early interaction and
collaboration to eliminate issues and surface better solutions.

Not unlike the Andon cord, Stack Overflow for Teams allows
users to quickly and easily solicit input and assistance from
colleagues, ideally before the issue becomes a significant
blocker for the whole team.

Additional reading: Stack Overflow for Teams helps

transcend swarming and move toward a dynamic,
powerful knowledge loop.

The platform allows developers to solicit immediate

feedback and assistance from their community, even
connecting them with company experts outside of their
normal silos, while at the same time preserving critical
knowledge and essential context. This way, when the same
problem or a similar issue pops up, developers have the
solution immediately at hand.

Create a developer-first culture: focus on continual

learning

Stack Overflow for Teams helps normalize troubleshooting,

problem-solving, and mistake-making so that recognizing and
responding to crises becomes habitual.

Stack Overflow for Teams gives organizations the ideal

framework for building a generative culture in which users
actively seek and share information to improve efficiency and
performance. A purpose-built platform puts the developer
experience at the center. Creating opportunities to learn from
folks outside the team and uncovering SMEs throught the
organization.

22
Stack Overflow for Teams enables learning (and teaching) that
fits seamlessly into developers’ existing workflows and
leverages an already-trusted platform for developer
knowledge. The familiarity of Stack Overflow increases
adoption, reducing the risk associated with adoption of
unknown platforms, and meets developers where they
already are.

Case study: 84.51 is enabling learning and growth for

everyone.

Something interesting happened as employees began

sharing on Stack Overflow Teams. Data scientists showed off
their deep technical knowledge, answering questions on the
nuances of PySpark calculations before the designated
experts. Junior developers came out of the woodwork to
answer questions and contribute. It wasn’t just the
universally-known SMEs who were answering questions.
Anybody who had knowledge was sharing it. “You start to
identify who the real subject matter experts are,” said
Wones. Not only do Wones and his team have an easy
channel to ask questions of the SMEs in the entire company,
but those questions and answers remain easily accessible
for the next person.

23
Appendix B:


Platform Evaluation Checklist

What should you look for in a platform that enables the Three
Ways? The right platform should:

Support cross-functional collaboration as DevOps

moves closer to the business

Capture local knowledge and helps apply it to


global problems

Convert tacit, institutional knowledge into explicit

information that anyone can access

Improve productivity and reduces distractions by

allowing employees to ask and answer questions
without disrupting their established workflows

Surface subject matter experts (SMEs) throughout the

organization by connecting questions with the right
people to answer them

Reinforce a culture of continual learning and

experimentation where employees feel supported,
inspired, and not terrified of making mistakes

Build connections across remote and hybrid workforces

24
 To learn more visit

stackoverflow.co/explore-teams

© 2021 All Rights Reserved