Bigger on the Inside

Move It to the Left! The Unsung Joys of Early Process Feedback

Why Waiting for Feedback is So 1998—and How “Shifting Left” Can Save Your Sanity and Your Software

Let’s be honest: in the world of software, there are two universal truths. First, the coffee machine will always break right before a big release. Second, any feedback you don’t get early comes back to haunt you like last year’s fruitcake. Enter the magical, mystical, misunderstood art of “moving feedback to the left.” No, not a dance move—though if you do it right, you might break into a celebratory jig.

So, what does “left” mean? Imagine your software delivery process as a timeline, running from “aha!” (idea) to “oh no!” (deployment disaster). Traditionally, feedback—like code reviews, bug discoveries, or user testing—lives somewhere to the right, after all the easy decisions have been made and the “ship it!” button has been smashed with glee. But as anyone who’s read “Operations Antipatterns, DevOps Solutions” or survived a waterfall project knows, late feedback is basically a boomerang with a grudge.

Here’s the good news: smart teams are catching that boomerang early. From “Flow Engineering” to “Accelerate,” thought leaders agree—shift that feedback left, and you’ll laugh heartily while your competitors cry into their Gantt charts.

The Left Side: Now with 100% More Joy

So why is “the left” so special? No, it has nothing to do with politics or the direction your desk faces. In User Story Mapping, Jeff Patton reminds us that understanding what users need (and what they *don’t* need) as early as possible keeps us from building the world’s most sophisticated, but completely unnecessary, login page. “Flow Engineering” echoes this, emphasizing the miracles that happen when teams visualize work, throttle the chaos, and get feedback before the code congeals into something unchangeable.

Biggest Advantages of Moving Feedback Left (And Why Your Stress Ball Will Thank You)

• Catch Issues When They’re Still Cute and Fuzzy: Bugs, like puppies, are much easier to handle when they’re small. “Accelerate” points out that the earlier you find defects, the less time (and money, and existential angst) you spend fixing them. By the time a bug hits production, it’s grown fangs and a LinkedIn profile.
• No More Midnight Emergencies: “Operations Antipatterns, DevOps Solutions” describes the horror of waiting until after release to discover you just deployed a feature that emails everyone… every five minutes… forever. Early feedback means catching those “oops” moments while they’re still embarrassing, not catastrophic.
• Happier Users, Fewer Pitchforks: “User Story Mapping” shows how involving users early and often keeps them delighted and your inbox free of ALL CAPS complaints. When you find out a feature isn’t working for users upfront, you can pivot—without the drama of a post-release PR crisis.
• Flow Like a Zen Master: According to “Flow Engineering,” value streams only flow smoothly when feedback gets unblocked early. Waiting for late feedback is like building a dam in your own river: you’ll get flooded, and not with praise.
• Faster Delivery, Less Hair Pulling: “Accelerate” demonstrates the strong correlation between fast, early feedback and high-performing teams. It’s science! (Or at least, very convincing bar charts.)
• Google Would Approve: In “Software Engineering at Google,” the wisdom is clear: make it safe (and cheap) to try things out. That means getting feedback when fixing is still fun, not a headline in the postmortem newsletter.

How to Move Feedback Left—Without Dislocating Anything

Okay, you’re convinced. But how do you start shifting, left-ward-ho, without smashing your process (or your monitor) in the process? Take a page (or five) from the DevOps and lean playbooks:

• Pair Programming and Code Reviews: Don’t wait until your code is a tangled mess of “TODO” comments. Get a second set of eyeballs early. It’s like having a friend check your teeth for spinach—before the big interview.
• Unit Tests: Because Hope is Not a Strategy: “Software Engineering at Google” recommends writing tests early. If your code can’t pass the basics, it’s not ready for the real world. Bonus: test failures are much less insulting than bug reports from management.
• Continuous Integration: The Sooner, the Butter: Automate builds and tests. “Accelerate” argues CI is the secret weapon of elite teams, making feedback faster, more reliable, and less dependent on that one person who remembers all the bash commands.
• User Story Mapping: The Map is Not the Territory, Unless You Talk Early: Before you write a line of code, map out what success looks like with real users. Their feedback is like WiFi: always better when you get it up front.
• Blameless Retrospectives: Laugh at Mistakes, Learn from Them: “Operations Antipatterns, DevOps Solutions” encourages a culture where no one gets tossed under the bus for early errors. If you make feedback safe, people will seek it out (sometimes even before coffee).
• Feature Flags: The Lazy River of Deployment: Release early, release often, and if things go sideways, just toggle a flag. Nothing says “I value early feedback” like showing code to *actual users* in a controlled way.

What Happens If You Stay on the Right?

Let’s imagine the alternative. You decide to stick with your “feedback at the end” tradition. Things are going swimmingly until, somewhere between release candidate and “go live,” you discover the login page needs a button that says “Do Not Press This Button.” Or, worse, your users discover that pressing it sends their data straight to the Marketing team’s group chat.

Late feedback is like finding out, after assembling your new desk, that you’ve put the top on backwards and the legs in the wrong place. Sure, you could pretend it’s a “standing desk,” but deep down, you know you could’ve asked for help sooner. “Accelerate” confirms: late discoveries are expensive. Your budget, your team, and your hairline will all take a hit.

The Legends of Left: Real-Life Glories

All this theory is well and good, but what about real stories? In “Software Engineering at Google,” teams that shifted feedback left reduced outages, improved morale, and got more sleep (which, in the tech world, is the ultimate perk). “Operations Antipatterns, DevOps Solutions” is basically a graveyard of war stories about what happens when feedback comes too late—midnight deploys, frantic rollbacks, and the infamous “why didn’t we know sooner?” Slack channel.

Meanwhile, “Flow Engineering” describes teams who visualized their work early, got feedback from EVERYONE (including the office dog), and dramatically shortened their cycle times. “User Story Mapping” is full of tales where the early involvement of users turned potential disasters into delightful wins.

Conclusion: Move Fast and Ask Questions Now

Moving feedback to the left isn’t just for the cool kids or for the ones who read DevOps books on weekends (though, if that’s you, keep up the good work). It’s for every team that’s tired of surprises, for every developer who dreams of smooth releases, and for every user who wants features that, you know, work.

So next time you’re tempted to “just finish it and see what happens,” channel your inner DevOps sensei and ask, “What if we got feedback now, instead of after the incident review?” Your future self—and possibly your coffee machine—will thank you.

Now, go forth, move feedback to the left, and remember that in software, as in life, it’s best to find out what’s wrong before the demo.