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Principles of Feedback

ยท 2 minute read

The second principles of DevOps - Principles of Feedback - is all about detecting problems before they occur and maintaining high quality standards.

This principle acknowledges that complex systems are (by definition) are too complicated for a single individual to understand. Hence, if things are not fixed immediately when they break, then they become that much harder and costly to fix - the further “away” from the source / origin / author, the harder and more costly.

Counter-intuitively, the best practice for addressing (increasingly small) problems is by halting everything and Swarm and Solve the problem. That means: Escalating local problems globally.

To understand what is going on within a complex system (within a software organization) Pervasive Telemetry needs to be deployed, so that correlation between action and consequence become visible fast.

Further, it is requires to design the flows / processes in small Batch Size, so that signals (from telemetry) can be unambiguously assigned.

As a result, quality is constantly improved, with the “big problems” being identified fast / early on, then increasingly “smaller” problems can be detected and mitigated / eliminated.


The work in DevOps Organizations flows from left to right, the feedback then flows from right to left in the form of Feedback Loops. Feedback acts time delayed.

--------        --------        --------
| Work | =====> | Work | =====> | Work | =====> ...
--------        --------        --------
  ^   ^           |   ^          |   |
   \   \_________/     \_________/   |
    \_______________________________/
	          Feedback Loops

Following steps can be modified via Feedforward Loops.

--------        --------        --------
| Work | =====> | Work | =====> | Work | =====> ...
--------        --------        --------
 |   |           ^   |          ^   ^
  \   \_________/     \_________/   |
   \_______________________________/
            Feedforward Loops

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