Lessons Learned: Shortening the Feedback loop

Web application development combines very detailed work, like adding just two pixels above a component; systems work, like that the front-end should submit only an ID; and general principles. This section summarizes the general principle we should always use. Good principles help to drive a productive and effective process. We discuss the three principles that we suggest following in the sections below.

Old practices

In the old days, programmers would write their code on cards and hand them to the machine operator to run. The cards would go into a queue and be run later, sometimes days later. The result would be output on more cards and returned to the programmer. If the program crashed or some mistake was made, the program would need to be debugged given just that output and then resubmitted to the queue.