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Software development companies started to adopt the principles of Extreme Programming and Agile Development to help reduce risk in a world where change is inevitable. To help adapt to this inevitable change, agile principles call upon feedback and a lot of it. Many people understand the importance of customer feedback (advice during requirements meetings, user acceptance testing, etc…) and unit tests, which gives developers instant feedback several times a day. An equally important source of feedback comes from the testing team who can provide quick, quality feedback. In order to receive the highest quality feedback from a testing team they must be an integral part of the team. A member of the team should be involved in all design discussions not only to help developers understand all the requirements enabling better design, but to also give themselves a better understanding of what they will be testing once development is complete. Builds should be pushed to the testing environment frequently allowing testing to begin as quickly as possible once stories are completed. The quicker testing can begin the quicker feedback can be received. Receiving feedback immediately after finishing the development of a story is much more efficient than waiting for a testing cycle for many reasons. Here are a few: • The code is still fresh in the developers mind. It will not take nearly as long to find and fix a defect, add a missed requirement, or add a new requirement. • The code will not be entwined in too many places making re-factoring (if needed) much simpler. • There is no “code freeze” allowing changes to immediately get deployed back to the testing environment. • If testers have been creating automated functional tests the suite can be ran in its entirety, which acts as a quick form of regression testing. Adapting to change is the key to successfully delivering to our customers and feedback is our conduit to what changes are approaching. According to the book “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Second Edition” we need to strive to generate as much feedback as we can handle as quickly as possible because the sooner we know, the sooner we can adapt. One of the simplest ways to generate feedback is to support the testing team in their efforts to test early and often throughout a project. On your next project don’t forget about the testing team, their feedback will save you time and money while increasing your chances of successfully delivering a high quality product to your customer.