Feedback driven development - it's like yoga for my apps

This is the second blog post inspired (provoked?) by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s TED talk on our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves". The first installment applied his theory to User Experience (UX) design principles; this installment pivots from a user’s experience of their applications to an application’s experience of its users.

Kahneman’s thesis is that our remembering self (that part of the mind that organizes experiences into stories to be replayed) dominates our decision making and that our experiencing self (that part of the mind that is in the here and now and feels things like happiness) has little residual impact on our decision making. The root cause is evolutionary. Humans are programmed to re-live the past to better anticipate the future (so that we survive). So, when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated stories (anticipated memories of experiences to be had).

Yet, if we allow our life to be dictated too heavily by these memories (that are incomplete and all too often inaccurate) – the imbalance between our remembering and experiencing selves will ultimately extract a huge emotional, psychic and physical toll.

This explains why practices like yoga are so transformative and powerful to so many; yoga is all about restoring balance. Yoga is about being present physically, emotionally and spiritually – yoga is designed to offset our evolutionary programming of re-living the past to anticipate the future.  

An application’s programming is the polar opposite; an application lives 100% in the present. An application operates as pure “experiencing self.” At every given moment during an application’s lifecycle, it is the sum total of its software state, data values, exception handling, etc.) with no rendition of the past and no notion of the future. This complete lack of contextual awareness – of always and only being in the moment - is an imbalance of its own and just as unhealthy as someone who is never in the moment. User experience, software quality and security gaps are often, at their root, tied to an application’s poor contextual response in production; the absence of historical data and heuristics (a remembering self) causes all sorts of problems for an app and its users – and all sorts of grief for its creators.

The source of our respective dysfunctions (people and apps) can be traced to the differences in our respective genesis; people evolve while applications are created. Here’s the rub. Apps may not worry about the success of future generations (iterations) – but their creators do!  What are the practices that we, as application creators, can follow to ensure application balance (to optimize user experience, quality and ROI)?

Question: What is the application analog to yoga?

Answer: Feedback driven development and automated operational response to runtime behaviors.

To bring balance to applications means offsetting an application's bias to always be in the moment just as yoga offsets our tendency to be everywhere BUT in the moment. Feedback driven development and the increasingly automated and sophisticated operational responses to application events (DevOps) are designed to do just that – to ensure that both production applications and their future iterations are increasingly responsive and effective over time.

Now before we go too crazy – lets agree that analogies are not tautologies (or else we wouldn’t need two different words would we?) so we can only go so far with something like this – but here’s a little table that maps this out…

Yoga stuff	Development stuff	How they line up…
Physical, mental and spiritual well being	User experience, software quality and development ROI	What it is we’re trying to get right (fine tune)
Yoga Sutras	Agile Methodology	An organized approach to restoring balance
Hatha Yoga	ALM & DevOps	The dimension of the practice focused on the real world.
Asanas	Patterns and practices	Pose[s] or pattern(s) you can hold/implement with ease

Whether or not your willing to follow me on this yoga analogy - I think the fundamental point is that a balanced development process (and an app with maximum ROI) must make it easier for development to improve future iterations and operations to manage. Conversely, its unhealthy (unproductive) for development to favor its inherent bias - to build applications that merely meet predefined functional specifications;  it serves everyone's selfish interests to invest in practices and technologies that connect applications in production to development and operations.