The chain itself is community property. No single author owns it. Everyone has run it. Everyone has broken it. The stages were not invented — they were agreed upon.
Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations IT Revolution Press, 2016.
The standard reference for the practices behind the chain. The handbook does not invent the loop — it names the failure modes that prevent it closing.
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win IT Revolution Press, 2013.
The failure mode as narrative. The plant floor logic applied to the software factory. The Three Ways as the principle beneath the chain.
Jez Humble, David Farley Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation Addison-Wesley, 2010.
The pipeline as engineering object. The deployment pipeline as the artefact of the entire chain.
v0.1.0 — KAI Worlds — Kai Schlüter — March 2026