Keynote: On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles
summary
Argues for shrinking feedback loops with concrete changes: remove Gerrit removed style long PR queues, switch to live on main or pairing so merges happen in minutes not weeks, and stop-the-line to clean flaky tests. Gives numbers: unit tests seconds, system tests 4–24 hours, one junior PR stalled a week, an entire team discarding six months of work. Describes env locks, flakey CI, and an incentive that works — lop an hour get a pie — plus releasing only when tests are trustworthy.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:08What is feedback
- 2:47Software
- 6:22Schrdingers Cat
- 8:56Agile
- 10:01The Reality
- 12:26The Gap
- 13:05In the Wild Feedback
- 13:40Types of Feedback
- 15:57User Feedback
- 17:18Fruit Flies
- 17:58A cautionary tale
- 22:19We made a change
- 24:25Branching strategies
- 25:28Feature branching
- 26:18Team branching
- 28:53Test pollution
- 30:09Test failures
- 34:46The cautionary tale
- 39:24Strategies
- 40:44Test Execution Time
- 41:44Pies
- 42:38Healthy feedback loops
- 43:34Cold Learning Cycle
