The power of feedback

"Everyone has a story that makes me stronger." -- Richard Simmons

There’s something about feedback. Whether it’s the validation of your latest idea, a hit on your webpage showing up on Google Analytics, or something as simple as a passing test, it’s a valuable and important motivational commodity, which can also shape the direction in which we’re going very precisely.

The effect of feedback is the engine at the root of software techniques as diverse as pairing, TDD, BDD and the Lean Startup movement. Why is feedback so powerful?

Feedback shortens the loop

Any sort of feedback represents the end of a creative loop that started when we began to work on whatever we’re receiving feedback about. The shorter that loop, the more quickly we can respond to change, and the more agile we can be. It also helps us know when we’re done working on something and it’s time to move on.

That’s partly why TDD is so powerful: we receive instant feedback on what we’re working on and we are never more than a few minutes away from a fully working system. It’s also why good quality customer feedback is powerful: we’re never more than a few iterations away from the feature the customer wants.

Feedback validates us and our work

The validation of our work is one of the things that lies at the root of pairing: the constant code review and the camaderie keeps us motivated and working on something longer than we can manage on our own. I’ve found programming on Sol Trader alone to be an enlightening experience - I’ve learnt how important it is to have others working alongside me. I now have a graphics expert reviewing my code, and more design and artistic help to keep me motivated to turn out releases.

It’s also incredibly motivating to receive a “thank you!” or “looks great!” There’s a lot of power in simple encouragement. If we know our work is appreciated and valued, we’ll likely to work longer and with more energy on that next killer feature.

However, there’s a danger in only seeking pure validation, or (worse) coming to rely on it for motivatioW. If we receive too much positive validation, we’ll end up getting proud of ourselves and demotivated to push for excellence, and we’ll get terminally discouraged if we get too little. We should be seeking the kind of feedback that motivates us to shape our work for the better. We have to learn to ask the right questions.

Feedback shapes our work

If we let it, feedback will change the work we do and how we do it. This applies no matter how we receive feedback about our work - the different types of feedback will change our work in different ways, and we must therefore strive to increase both the quality and the variety of the feedback we receive, without falling into the trap of simple validation.

Done right, TDD offers more that just validation of our code; it gives us information about the quality of our code design. It causes us to shape our code differently and more carefully than code written without feedback. We can’t operate in isolation though: TDD without feedback from stakeholders (whether that’s through a technique such as Behaviour Driven Development or some other method) is incomplete: we get feedback that our code works, but nothing on whether it’s the right code.

There’s more: conversations such as Lean Startup are taking the BDD ideas one stage further. Instead of relying on the guesses of the stakeholders to determine what the right features are, how about harnessing feedback from the actual customers using the product? This can be done in various ways, through automatic metrics gathering and tracking experiments rather than features.

It’s my opinion that the Lean Startup conversation is certainly as important as the BDD conversation, and potentially as important as the Agile conversation, as it improves the variety of the feedback we receive on our work.

How are you finding feedback shapes your work? Are you getting the right kinds of feedback from a variety of sources? Or are you settling for pure validation?