Feedback is key, but not free

If there is one thing we learnt from the agile / lean movement is that feedback is key.

The customer should be involved regularly so that he can let the team know in which direction the project should go. The team members meet daily to track the progress and identify impediments. The team takes a step back and retrospects at the end of each iteration to spot irregularities in the team mechanics. To ensure that the code fulfills yesterday's requirements developers make use of automatic tests. These are all feedback loops that regulate the dynamics of software development.

Feedback is key. But, is it free? If the customer does not invest the time, that feedback loop is broken. If the team does not discuss regularly, impediments do not get discovered on time. If the tests do not get written, we do not know if the assumptions from yesterday still hold after today's changes.

Feedback is not free. You have to invest in various feedback mechanisms if you want to benefit from the feedback loops.

It was not always obvious that the above mentioned feedback loops are worthwhile the effort. But, little by little, the evidence piled up, and now it is rather obvious that a large part of the software development effort should indeed by invested in building and maintaining the feedback loops.

The business case is now available and rather compelling. Do take 15 minutes each day to get your team members to talk to each other. Do allocate some half a day every two weeks to get the customer review your progress. Even allocate a couple of hours to talk about fluffy retrospective stuff that has almost nothing to do with business. And by all means, do get your developers to invest a third of their time into writing tests.

It turns out that doing all these is better than doing otherwise. In fact, the cost associated with them would be spent anyway, only implicitly. Tackling these activities explicitly makes the cost manageable and provides the basis for improvement.

Humane assessment uncovers yet another feedback loop that regulates the mismatch between what the team thinks and what is in the system. Currently, this loop is missing and the means to reaching decisions is implicit and ineffective. As a result the decisions can turn out to be quite offtrack.

Feedback is not free, but it is profitable. How much are you willing to invest?