The Last Time

a post about feedback loops and the "other" kind of testing

A lot of people who read my post, Don’t Blame Me didn’t read the second half where I talked about looking at customer usage patterns and fast feedback loops. Let’s dive in a bit deeper.

Feedback Loops and the Ways of DevOps

Feedback Loops. Feedback Loops. Feedback Loops.

The DevOps Handbook by Kim, Humble, et al describes the Three Ways of DevOps - The first is Flow (systems thinking and optimizing the system - worth mentioning here is one of my favorites, Principles of Product Development Flow (Reinertsen)). The second and third are unfortunately neglected or ignored too often. These are Feedback, and Experimentation & Continual Learning.

We want feedback loops to be as fast as possible. This guidance tells us if we’re doing the right thing - and if we aren’t, we adjust. For example, I’ve written background processes that detect code changes, and then automatically run tests against that changed code, alerting me if there is a test failure, a static analysis error, or a drop in code co…