CS448 Software Development Capstone – “Apprenticeship Patterns”: “Create Feedback Loops”

The part of the “Apprenticeship Patterns” textbook by David H. Hoover and Adewale Oshineye that I find myself flipping back and forth through the most is the fifth chapter, titled Perpetual Learning. I’m planning to depend on my skills in software craftsmanship to establish a stable career and earn enough money to finance my other pursuits in life, and consequently I need to think seriously about nurturing my foundational skills and refining my learning process.

I’m taking a course this semester that has me relearning C++, a language that I haven’t used in several years. I had been programming almost entirely in Java since beginning Worcester State University’s Computer Science program, and the material of this course is requiring me to jump right back into the deep end of C++. I find myself unsure whether my approaches to certain challenges are correct or not, as well as feeling more concerned with whether my code will compile instead of whether I am learning the tools of the C++ language effectively.

When I want to truly absorb some kind of knowledge, I’ve realized that I learn something best when I receive positive feedback when I demonstrate my skills properly and correctly. When I wanted to learn how to play the guitar when I was younger, the first thing I tried to learn was the start of “Breaking The Law” by Judas Priest. The positive feedback I got from learning that part was hearing sounds from the guitar that I was playing that sounded a lot like actual music! After that, I couldn’t stop myself from learning how to be a better guitar player because of how much I wanted to keep myself in that positive feedback loop. I kept learning, I sounded better, and the feedback loop has been growing more rewarding as time goes on. I’m confident that lots of other people can relate to this experience, even if the thing that they were trying to learn wasn’t music or playing an instrument. Being able to gauge your own progress through positive feedback benefits the learning process dramatically.

This pattern is concerned with creating that same kind of positive feedback loop within the context of software craftsmanship. Seeing the quality of your output increase in proportion to your effort in learning can be the fuel that keeps a programmer engaged in refining their craft. The pattern is introduced with a quote from Jerry Weinberg’s “Project Retrospectives”:

“We in the software industry are working with a more or less invisible product, yet this very invisibility only heightens our need for feedback.”

It feels difficult for me to decide “where I am” as a programmer without comparing myself to the people around me. That approach takes my focus away from my own growth however, and I want to avoid it. So instead, the solutions proposed by this development pattern include researching test-driven development and using interactive interpreters that can let the programmer catch errors and see outputs as they write code. The programmer also has the option to intentionally reach out and seek feedback on their coding process from peers and mentors, or by participating in pair programming. A given example of applying this pattern in the real world is asking the interviewer for a position that you were not accepted for why the company didn’t want to bring you on board. This is a more positive framing of what could be a rather upsetting situation, and an outside perspective can also give you insight into aspects of your work and yourself you hadn’t paid attention to.

The key to collecting all this data is to construct useful and actionable feedback for yourself. The pattern defines “useful feedback” as feedback that you can do something in response to that informs you whether to do more or less of a certain behavior. The textbook challenges the reader to put this pattern into action by identifying a metric in their working environment that they have the capacity to change and measure. Then, use the measurements of that metric to try and understand how your actions have changed your “working environment”.

Reflecting on this pattern has made me realize that I have rarely, if ever, sought out external feedback for projects that I’ve worked on outside of school. I’ll write code, compile it, and push it to my Github, but I’ve never made the effort to construct testing suites or seek external criticism from other programmers. These habits have enabled a feeling of doubt to sprout within me about whether my code could be adapted to perform a useful task, or whether I’m actually making any progress in my learning. I’ve started thinking about the advice proposed by this development pattern, and I’m going to take the time to read “Test-Driven Development: By Example” by Kent Beck, the reading material sourced in this pattern. I’m also going to research the features of Visual Studio, my preferred text editor, to see if there are any extensions that allow for the features offered by interactive interpreters.

I’m not sure that I understand the pattern’s advice about “gathering metrics to understand the effects of your changes to your working environment”, but the practical advice of using software tools to provide feedback as you work as well as inviting constructive criticism from others makes perfect sense to me. The pattern also urges the learner to put themselves in situations conducive to building these feedback loops. I think that some of the strongest fuel for those feedback loops are the relationships we create with others along our learning journey, and in the online realm of software development, I don’t think it would be hard to find a community of developers eager to forge and fully energize those feedback loops.