Feedback Loops Generate Purpose-driven Partnerships
by Tim Williams, Certified Salesforce administrator & Service Cloud consultant
Businesses collaborating in today’s digital world achieve goals unimaginable a decade ago.
Characterizing these strong alliances are:
• trust
• shared goals
• transparency
• effective communication
To achieve and maintain these attributes, partnering organizations embed feedback loops into their development-and-integration projects.
Seeking validation
Feedback loops are mechanisms used to validate and obtain responses about the software-development process.
The goal? Obtaining info that can immediately be fed back into the process. This accelerated pace—a relatively new approach—improves the overall development process. Beginning circa 2000, individuals overseeing software development-and-implementation projects determined they weren’t responding quickly enough to the ever-shifting market.
That prompted movement toward an agile framework that encourages and depends on stakeholder input through the entire product lifecycle. Feedback loops were added to the communication process (arguably the most critical element in software creation).
Let’s examine “external” feedback loops, meaning those events or mechanisms involving stakeholders.
Tools of the trade
Nothing is more important than user feedback. The last thing you want to do is spend time going in the wrong direction. Weekly stakeholder meetings help counter this.
Project-monitoring software, such as Scrum or KanbanFlow, makes planning and communicating project timelines and milestones easy. These tools reveal bottlenecks, chronicle progress and help establish trust between partners.
Though critical, stakeholder-and-user meetings don’t require a lot of time, nor must they occur at regularly scheduled intervals. Avoid time-consuming meetings by using such communication tools as Slack, which encourages users to submit feature requests and bug reports—great for collecting user feedback.
At Development Consulting Partners, we use comments via KanbanFlow to communicate and track issues, so feedback isn’t lost.
Get involved
Stakeholders and user involvement in testing promotes meaningful feedback.
Providing a fast feedback loop are:
• unit tests
• integration tests
• automated web tests
We often place completed items in user acceptance testing sandboxes accessible to stakeholders and users for testing. Any feedback quickly can be used to initiate modifications.
Regression testing verifies a software change won’t impact a product’s existing functionality. This is vital when changes (even those previously reviewed and approved) are placed in production. We do this regularly on our projects to verify the interoperability of all work performed.
A sprint review should occur when a product increment is completed.
During this meeting, the development team asks stakeholders to review whether the work demonstrated (potentially shippable) has achieved completion. Stakeholders might want to use the application before they can accurately assess whether finished status has been achieved, especially if UAT testing wasn’t performed.
The meeting also offers the opportunity to:
• ask questions
• make observations
• provide feedback/suggestions
• discuss how best to move forward
Don’t stop now
Many people stop at the sprint review, but I encourage advancing to the adoption-tracking stage. This allows you to determine the number of customers (and possibly internal users) using your new feature. Understanding how your product is being used is an important feedback loop. New functionality, user interface or processes might be necessary—or at least helpful.
If communication between stakeholders and the development team is at the heart of the agile framework, we can say feedback loops are the conduits for a successful partnership.
The way in which we value partnership at DevCon manifests itself in our thirst for feedback. It’s fundamental to the DevCon Difference.
Questions? Feel free to contact us.
ABOUT DEVELOPMENT CONSULTING PARTNERS, LLC
Seeking superior Salesforce support? Experience the DevCon Difference℠. Development Consulting Partners, LLC is a certified Salesforce Partner. Founded in 2017, Development Consulting Partners serves clients across North America via a coast-to-coast team of trusted Salesforce experts. These specialists implement affordable & customized business solutions centered on the possibilities offered by the world’s #1 CRM platform: Salesforce. Find out how our consultants can invigorate and elevate your organization.