The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution

(Dispatch from the Scenius) Elisabeth Hendrickson’s 2014 and 2015 DOES Talks on Feedback Loops, with Commentary from Gene Kim

Jun 18, 2020

Elisabeth Hendrickson, an experienced QA engineer, explores the relationship between testing and quality in this podcast. She shares her journey of realizing that the better she got at her job, the worse it made things for the organization. Hendrickson highlights the importance of feedback cycles and creating visibility around them. She also discusses polluted feedback, the illusion of speed over progress, and the significance of feedback loops in creating a learning organization.

49:08

Creator website

Episode guests

Elisabeth Hendrickson

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Maintaining tight and clean feedback cycles is crucial for effective decision-making and continuous improvement.

Visibility in code, systems, and organizations leads to positive changes, better conversations, and effective problem-solving.

Deep dives

The importance of tight and clean feedback cycles

One of the main takeaways from the podcast is the significance of having tight and clean feedback cycles. The speaker emphasizes the need to reduce feedback latency and ensure that the feedback streams are not polluted. Real feedback, based on empirical evidence, is crucial for effective decision-making and continuous improvement. The podcast highlights the challenges of managing test suites and build times, the risk of false alarms or false failures, and the temptation to prioritize speed over progress. The overall message is that maintaining and optimizing feedback cycles requires dedication, effort, and a focus on creating a learning organization.

Introduction

3min

Optimizing for Time, Testers vs. Developers Ratio, and the Impact of Quality Improvement

4min

Uncovering System Behavior and Importance of Feedback Loops

15min

Implementing Code Review Processes and Challenges with QA

3min

The Importance of Feedback Loops in Creating a Learning Organization

23min

Upcoming Interview and Highlights of DevOps Enterprise Summit London

2min

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

Twitter

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