Hi,

Most of the article is based on the recommendations done by the DORA metrics and by the research presented in the Accelerate book by Nicole Forsgren.

That research collected information from more than 10.000 companies from diverse profiles, including different sectors and different sizes.

The questions come from the research and from the practices that they have verified that are at least correlated with high-performance development.

Yet, I have to confess that I kept the 18 and 19 from Joel's 12 Steps to Better Code, that they did not are in the original research, to keep the number round to 20, but also because they seem necessary. The 18, quiet development environment, that has been researched in many other studies. And the 19, I believe that is how the CI pipelines began, and also how we are adopting GitHub Copilot. For example, the latter did not exist when Accelerate was published.

The idea behind is that the best way to improve performance in development is not coaching, talks, etc. but rather changing the environment so people's behavior adjusts, and that list aims for that change.