I did not have high hopes for this book; the promise of “a novel about DevOps” in the subtitle foreshadowed stilted prose, one-dimensional characters, and a formulaic arc. I’m not saying the language was great or that the characters were well-developed, but neither the prose nor the characters were bad enough to distract from the plot, which was told clearly and expertly paced. Overall, the book read like good genre fiction that just happened to describe kanban, lean manufacturing, and value stream mapping in depth. I breezed through it in a single sitting.