Fifteen years ago I was running a traditional QA department, and I had a horrifying realization: the better I got at my job, the worse I made things for the organization as a whole.

This counter-intuitive realization spurred me on a journey to understand the relationship between testing and quality, and ultimately to the study of feedback loops in software development processes. Ultimately I found my way to Extreme Programming, and now work at Pivotal where we practice a particularly opinionated form of it.

In this talk you’ll hear about my journey from the traditional silos with inherently long feedback latency to my current reality of increasingly tight feedback loops, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.