The Cost of Slow Feedback Loops
4 points
2 hours ago
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| revontulet.dev
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necovek
1 hour ago
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One thing I like to add to this is that there is a cost of context switch (average of 15-25 minutes, depending on the study, and obviously varying significantly between types of tasks), and we lose focus when waiting takes more than 15s or 30s [citation missing, though you can look it up].

Slow feedback loop will add the above 15-20 minutes as soon as you switch to something else because it took more than 15-30s (on average, though).

I like to note that there are also people who are amazing good at both regaining focus, and not getting flustered by switching between tasks. I am not one of them, though :)

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rednafi
38 minutes ago
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The SoA and the team structure often worsen this. If your service consists of AWS S3, SQS, MSK, and Kinesis, then you'd have to invest quite heavily in the local setup to make sure everything still works and that the majority of the tests can be run in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, it's impossible to run the full fleet locally if it's a substantially large system, but investing in the local workflow for a particular domain is absolutely paramount. Otherwise, the context switch required to integrate and work with a system like this is absolutely massive, and the lead time for a new feature will take a major hit.

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