The Importance of Feedback Loops in Creating a Learning Organization

In the second installment of The Idealcast’s Dispatch From the Scenius series, Gene Kim explores Elisabeth Hendrickson’s 2015 and 2014 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentations.
Listen as Gene breaks down Hendrickson’s experience and learnings, all to help you find fundamental principles to apply to immediately keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

In this episode, Hendrickson, an experienced QA engineer, shares her realization that the better she got at her job, the worse she made things for the organization as a whole. Thus began her journey to uncover the relationship between testing and quality, which has led her to a reality of increasingly tight feedback loops.

Episode Timeline:

• [00:00] Intro
• [00:22] Meet Elisabeth Hendrickson and her DevOps Enterprise Summit Presentation
• [01:02] Elisabeth’s presentation intro
• [02:02] Silicon Valley 1999
• [05:43] Quality is getting worse
• [06:42] Steamer round table and System of Effects Diagram
• [07:54] Theory: Increase quality by throwing more testers at the problem
• [08:49]The existence of QA created more bugs
• [10:20] Feedback Cycles
• [15:01] Shrodinger’s Cat and Fragile not Agile
• [18:43] Creating visibility around Feedback Cycles
• [26:19] Kolb’s learning cycle
• [28:03] How team’s branch and merge
• [32:20] Polluted feedback
• [33:40]WordCount Simulation
• [36:33] Better visibility
• [37:42] Takeaways
• [40:56] The illusion of speed over real progress
• [47:11] Outro 

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Elisabeth Hendrickson is a leader in software engineering. She most recently served as VP R&D for Pivotal Software, Inc. A lifelong learner, she has spent time in every facet of software development, from project management to design for companies ranging from small start-ups to multinational software vendors. She has helped organizations build software in a more efficient way and pioneered a new way to think about achieving quality outcomes and how that hinges on fast and effective feedback loops. Her book, Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, was released in 2013 and explores technical excellence and mastery, and creating effective feedback loops for everyone. She spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, 2015, and 2018, and received the Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance in 2010.

Visit Elisabeth’s website

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YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• Feedback loops.
• Feedback and opinion are different things.
• Beware of polluted feedback streams.
• WordCount simulation.
• Fighting feedback entropy takes enormous energy.
• Meetings are easy; getting real work done is hard.
• Tools and test frameworks are foundational: the devs who build them have to be better than average.
• Becoming a learning organization.

RESOURCES

• It's All About Feedback, Elisabeth Hendrickson’s 2015 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation video.
• On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles, Elisabeth Hendrickson’s 2014 DevOps Enterprise Summit presentation video.
• On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles slide deck.
• It’s All About Feedback slide deck.
• Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson
• “Let a thousand flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.” Gigamonkeys.
• The WordCount Simulation by Elisabeth Hendrickson.