This year again, the Atlassian Summit was amazing ! First of all, we want to thanks everyone for visiting the Hiptest booth. We really appreciate met you and discussed with you !

Summit sessions

As each year, Atlassian Summit is the opportunity to attend very interesting conferences. This year, two sessions caught our attention :

The importance of feedback loops, Dan North

During his talk, Dan North shared great tips about delivering and receiving feedbacks.

“hundreds of very small braking are better than one huge braking”

To explain the importance of feedback loops, he started with a great example: car brake system. Before ABS system, using brakes could be very dangerous. The difference now? Thanks to very short short feedback loops the system is able to deactivate and activate hundreds of times per second the brakes when needed.

Delay in feedback increases “drift”

• Reduces system’s responsiveness
• Limits options
• Increases processing effort

The same applies to software development and that’s were DevOps comes in .

Part 1: The feedback loop

Feedback itself is a system that can have tremendous impact if implemented well. There are 3 steps:

• Offered or sought
• Heard
• Actioned

If there is no action after getting the feedback, it breaks the loop. If you keep sharing feedbacks but see no impact or changes then why do it? That’s a whole system that can be improved.

Part 2: Deliver feedback

Feedback should be only about behavior not about who we are. That’s the tricky part as we usually take it personally. So the way to deliver feedback is important.

Dan suggested to look at the SBI model to deliver feedback: Situation / Behavior / Impact

The typical way to deliver great feedback would be: Given this situation when you had such a behavior (without judgments) then it had an impact on (the feedback itself)…

It is interesting to notice that the same model applies to describe great acceptance criteria with Behavior Driven Development.

Part 3: Structuring feedback

Dan shared the “Sandwich feedback technique”. It’s composed of 3 main points:

• Offer specific positive regard
• Offer a growing edge
• End with general positive regard

This technique enables teams to structure feedbacks.

Part 4: Receiving feedback

That’s the simplest part. Just say “Thank you”. There is no step 2

Key takeaways

Feedback can deeply impact the system and help improving it. That’s exactly the core principle of DevOps and the continuous testing approach that we do promote at Hiptest. Get feedbacks at every stage of the development pipeline:

- Challenge the idea and get feedback with BDD

- Check the code and get feedback with automated testing

- Get feedback from production with living documentation and product analytics.

And don’t forget to always say thank you!

From 0 to 100 micro feature a day in a bank, Artem Glotov

At Hiptest, we love successful stories. It’s the case for Alfa-Bank, a Russian bank founded in 1990.

As many companies, Afla-Bank adopted waterfall methodology and so, the team had very long release cycles (2 to 3 months !). They also noticed a collaboration gap between all their teams, which brake their workflow.

All these elements combined and the employees stress take Alfa-Bank to change their way of work.

So, they decided to switch to Agile methodologies to improve their team collaboration. They also change their tool-suite by using Atlassian products, modern development methods like Git Flow and deployed a Continuous Integration.

These improvements enable Alfa-Bank teams to increase their productivity and communication and to make a successful transformation.

What the Hiptest team keep in mind

During this summit, we had many interactions with you about the benefits of Behavior Driven Development, the impact of DevOps and the power of living documentation.

At Hiptest, we deploy continuously in production (between 5 to 10 times a day), and we noticed that CI/CD is one of the key points for many of you. The quick feedback loop provided by CI/CD is definitely a major lever when it comes to deliver software and features that impact the user experience.

We hope you enjoyed the tradeshow and had a great time with the Hiptest team !

See you in Las Vegas!

- The Hiptest team.