Here’s a story about feedback, and how not to deal with it.
I started my career testing helicopter avionics.
Being an aviation nerd, this was a pretty great job.
What was less great, though, was the way the issues we found languished in the issue tracker.
I encountered some that were no less than a decade old. Predictably, they proved to be terrible to reproduce, work on, or close.
I spent literal days in meetings or on the phone, trying to chase down a single issue and see if it still existed (if ever), and what to do with it. Usually second-guessing engineers who had left years ago. Spectacularly wasteful, tedious work.
Moral of the story: feedback on its own is pointless – it needs to be acted upon. They’re called feedback loops, not cul-de-sacs, for a reason!
This may sound trivial, but I’ve seen too often that this is where the ball is dropped.
Fixing issues gets postponed, technical debt neglected. The feedback is thrown straight onto a growing heap, to rot.
A favourite excuse is to blame it on tools (the bug tracker sucks!), but the truth is it’s a cultural issue. The team needs to take feedback seriously, needs to have the space to take it seriously.
Truth be told, you can’t afford not to take it seriously.
(Photo by elvis santana from FreeImages)