Software development is no longer a one-person job. Today developing software requires team collaboration. People from different departments have to work together, understand each other, help with roadblocks and celebrate the wins to stay motivated. Good feedback loops and effective sprint retros play a vital role in keeping software projects on track, while bad ones destroy morale and create chaos.
For effective work environments, engineering organizations should pay attention to how they set up their feedback loops and sprint retrospective meetings. Organizations with great work environments attract more collaborative, creative, and productive developers.
Moreover, it’s more important now than ever to track common topics by keyword or by theme, see trends about team improvement over time and analyze sentiment of the feedback collected.
## Why Feedback Loops Matter
Software projects are becoming more complex. A simple project might only have a handful of people, but large projects can have hundreds of developers working in multiple teams. Building software is not only about the code; it involves marketing, finance, sales, IT, DevOps, etc. So, effective feedback loops have become essential to creating high-quality software. Feed loops help in the following ways:
Software companies use various software development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies. Different teams in the same organization might end up with varying methods of SDLC like Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, or a hybrid method.
Here are some popular feedback loops in today’s software development life cycles:
The feedback loops described above do not exist in silos. They flow into each other. A daily scrum meeting or a sprint retrospective meeting might discuss CI/CD, QA, and code review issues. When all the feedback loops work together in harmony, you have an environment where developers can thrive.
Looking at the different kinds of feedback a developer has to deal with daily, it is not hard to imagine that things can get complicated. Feedback loops become a problem when too many processes, tools, and technologies create unnecessary bureaucracy. Everything slows down, and developers spend more time dealing with feedback loops than solving problems and writing code. It can be frustrating and demotivating for the developers.
When engineering organizations design their software development pipeline, they should consider making it as frictionless as possible.
Organizations should automate repetitive manual tasks, eliminate unnecessary feedback loops and simplify complex ones.
Here are some principles to remember:
You can evaluate your feedback loops to figure out problem areas. If your CI/CD build process takes too long, your developers might get frustrated. If automated test suite results are unreliable, that might be another problem area. Your QA team might be sending bug reports after a few weeks instead of a few days and causing slowdowns in the whole development pipeline.
Every organization, every project, and every team is different. Organization leaders should carefully evaluate their processes and determine how to optimize feedback loops for their particular situation.
A scrum retrospective meeting or a sprint retrospective meeting is a unique event where the various feedback loops collide. So, it is a great place to start your feedback loop optimization journey.
In a retrospective meeting, your team can evaluate code review and analysis, QA, CI/CD, user feedback, test automation, and other feedback loops. A retro meeting is a perfect venue to pinpoint the problem areas and find ways to improve your work environment. Teams can further benefit from sharing sprint retrospective examples with other groups. The cross-pollination of ideas between teams can help leaders identify patterns and insights that can benefit the whole organization.
In summary, retrospective meetings can work as the operations center of all feedback loops in an organization. Companies can use agile retro meetings to shorten the feedback loops, improve the speed of software development and create a frictionless, satisfying work environment for developers.
