Providing Feedback To The Business

Feedback is a key concept in XP and it’s common for engineers to focus on feedback from the business in terms of what features are required, how to make things better etc. It is important however not to forget that feedback to the business is just as important

The business needs to know how things are going – to see that progress is being made and what the team is working on. To that end, we’ve started providing a whole series of pretty graphs showing our velocity on each project, the number of open bugs and a few graphs showing basic code quality metrics. It remains to be see how successful this will be but hopefully it will help provide some vital communication from engineering back to the rest of the business without needing an all-hands meeting every week.

One of the key steps that I hope will make this work, is that every graph includes a description of what the graph shows and what trends mean things are going well. So the code complexity graph explains that the graph should trend gradually downwards over time1.

I’ll be interested to watch this project and find out how useful it is to the rest of the business as a quick way of checking in on engineering. Naturally, it doesn’t substitute good old fashioned conversations and the other communication that goes on within the organization but it does provide a more general overview than conversations tend to give.

1 – That will probably need to change to say stay fairly constant once we get code quality down to an acceptable level.↩