Recently, in an article about maximising developer effectiveness, I analyzed the habits of low and highly effective engineering organizations.
One of the main driving concepts were feedback loops and being able to measure them. There are a number of key feedback loops that highly effective organizations have put a lot of effort into optimizing and maintaining.
We analyzed what developers are actually doing all day, and what they are hoping to achieve with each task. It can be thought of as a series of feedback loops. Abstractly, developers make a change and then want to validate that they are on the correct path.