With the highest performing DevOps teams deploying on average four times a day, the pressure is on. Your team should always be looking to improve the speed and quality of your process. A solution may be closer than you think.

What Is a Feedback Loop?

In society, we receive feedback continuously, from friends, family, and colleagues. Companies often have office telephone systems or entire call centers dedicated to receiving feedback from their customers. So, what is it doing in your DevOps process?

Feedback is the information or data you receive on a product you have made or a task you have performed. This feedback can be used to improve the product or the process you perform to make it.

Throughout your DevOps process, there are multiple occasions you will receive feedback, even if you don’t call it by that name. These different processes create what is known as your feedback loop.

A feedback loop is created by the interactions between the different sections of your DevOps team, as well as interactions between the end-users and the product. Keeping track of this data is vital to maintaining a healthy feedback loop, so it’s worth investing in small business management software or a team collaboration solution to enable this.

For example; an architect may design a nice new framework, at which point they pass it to the developers. If the developer finds this framework doesn’t work with what they already have, then it will be sent back to the architect until the idea is perfected. This is one small cross-section of your feedback loop.

Below you can see a feedback loop in its entirety.

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