Showing posts with label feedback loops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feedback loops. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Feedback Loop Workshop - The Vision

It  is extremely important to understand where we are and where we want to go. This Workshop is all about that, regarding Feedback Loops. It is mandatory to have people from every part of the organisation and from different roles, not only developers or testers. This is how we are ensuring that we are drawing a complete picture.

Material:

  • Big White Board. I prefer a movable one
  • Flip Charts. 1/5 people
  • Post Its
  • Pens 

Agenda:

  • What are the feedback loops
  • Picture about the present
  • Break
  • Vision about the future
  • Wrap UP


What are the feedback loops

This is a short talk about the Feedback Loop itself. This gives a basic understanding what we want to achieve in this Workshop.

Picture about the present

Split people in small groups. In the groups there should be diversity as much as possible. The size can be around 5 people. Give people a flip chart, pens and post-its. Ask people in groups to create picture about Feedback Loops in timeline. It needs to present the situation at the moment. People can be really free style. I usually draw really simple example. You can give groups around 20 minutes time to create their own picture.

After creating pictures, every group presents their view to the rest of the people, question may be asked, but try to avoid criticism, this is just showing the result from this part.

Create common picture. Share the white board into two parts. Draw the timeline and let people merge their pictures together. You can give a 20 minutes time box.

Rough example about feedback loops

Vision about the future

Now we are ready to draw the picture about the bright future. People can stay in the same groups or create new groups, again with the diversity. I prefer old groups, because there might be already some group dynamics in. Now same exercise, but let the people create a picture without the legacy. People should free their minds about solutions at the moment and they can really be as creative as they can. Again about 20 minutes.

Presenting the picture and in the end merging the pictures.


Wrap UP

You can briefly tell, what has happened today and what are the next steps. Ask people to present their pictures again.


My Last Words

Like I said in the beginning, the idea is to create vision. Vision does not need to be perfect. Nature of things are that they are changing, so this is just a snapshot about the situation at the moment and the vision what it should be. This snapshot should be created as often as needed. In other words, this is a longer process, not just one shot. :)

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Feedback Loops

I have been thinking, how to dig out the essence, why do we need Test Automation and Continuous Integration. Also how to help people to understand why these things are really important, when we are doing more fast paced software development.

I came up with two Workshops  which are related to one another. In this blog post, I'll explain the concept of Feedback Loops and there will be two more posts, which are describing those Workshops more carefully.

Copyright Robin Stott and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
So what do I mean with Feedback Loops? Feedback Loops are the things, when people who are developing the product starts to get feedback. Did he/she provide right kind of behavior to the product? In the end, customer is the one who gives the final verdict, does it do what they want.

These Feedback Loops can be something like this:
IDE
Unit Tests
Gollegue
Acceptance Tests
System Tests
Load Tests
...
Customer

And why are these so important? I have used this wine metaphor before. Abnormal behaviour is not like a wine, it does not get better with age. The sooner you catch and fix the abnormality, the better. What do you think, which one of these scenarios is cheaper? Customer finds a performance problem, which is caused by an architectural flaw vs. create small functionality based to the architecture and test it as soon as possible.

These thing are not directly tied to the Test Automation and Continuous Integration, but with the knowledge what I have, those things are mandatory to create as fast feedback as it can be.

Like I promised, following two posts will be about those workshops, so stay tuned.