(A talk given at PIPELINE Conference – March 2018 – Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles – https://pipelineconf.info/speakers/)

Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention: major defects; service outages; support escalations; or even scrapping just-completed capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. You already know that the sooner you can discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly you can remedy it. Agile practices involve testing early and often. However feedback cycles come in many forms. It’s not just about automated tests and CI. It’s also reading the mood in the room when pitching an idea or instrumenting the product to do cohort analysis in production. This talk examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. We’ll look at what makes feedback lose value as well as fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

Elisabeth Hendrickson, better known as @testobsessed, has been kicking around the software industry for a couple decades in a variety of roles including tester, developer, and agile enabler. Author of Explore It! from Pragmatic Books, she is also known for her Google Tech Talk on Agile Testing and popular Test Heuristics Cheatsheet. She won the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance in 2010. In 2012 after more than a decade as an independent consultant, she joined Pivotal, the company where she first learned eXtreme Programming (XP). She is now the VP R&D for Pivotal’s Big Data Suite.

Recent talks by Elisabeth include her XP 2016 keynote “XP At Scale” and her DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 talk “It’s All About Feedback“. We’re all huge fans of Elisabeth’s work on eXtreme Programming, exploratory testing, and Continuous Delivery.