Appendices

About the authors

Rebecca Murphey was Field CTO at Swarmia from 2023 to 2026, where she hosted the Engineering Unblocked podcast and worked with Swarmia customers and leaders across the industry on engineering effectiveness. Before that, she led engineering productivity efforts at Stripe and Indeed. Today, she works at Honeycomb as Principal AI Operations Lead. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Otto Hilska is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Swarmia. In 2009, he co-founded Flowdock (the Slack before Slack), acquired by Rally Software in 2013. After leaving Rally, Otto worked as the Chief Product Officer of Smartly.io, leading a fast-growing software organization while navigating emerging bottlenecks. He lives in New York City.

Oskari Kallio in Helsinki created the beautiful illustrations in this book, and the book was edited by Erin Backlund. The typefaces used in this book are Factor A by Ilya Naumoff and Crimson Pro by Jacques Le Bailly.

About Swarmia

We know from experience that building an effective software organization is not a one-and-done project. That’s why we’ve designed Swarmia, the engineering intelligence platform, to guide organizations on their continuous improvement journey, whether they’re only just getting started or are further along the path.

Thousands of companies, from startups to enterprises, use Swarmia to maximize business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience. Learn more at swarmia.com. For more resources related to this book, visit swarmia.com/build.

Acknowledgments

  • Erin Backlund, for figuring out how to edit and re-edit this book when everything kept changing.
  • Nathen Harvey, for writing our foreword, and for sharing expert insight — grounded in years of DORA research — that made this book better.
  • Ari Koponen, Eero Kettunen, Miikka Holkeri, and Jack Humphrey, for providing invaluable feedback on previous editions of this book.
  • Pinja Dodik, for championing and guiding this project.

Feedback and errata

If you believe you’ve found an error in this book or something that can be improved, please contact books@swarmia.com to ensure your feedback is considered for the next edition.

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