Negative Feedback and Team Performance. An Examination of How Team Reactions to Negative Feedback Affect Team Performance

PREFACE Is software development an art, a craft, science, engineering, or something else entirely? Does it even matter? Yes, it does matter, and it matters to you. Your actions and their results will differ depending on which of those is more correct. The main thing is this: You want your software out soon and relatively defect-free, but more than that, you need a way to examine how your team is doing along the way. Purpose It is time to reexamine the notions underlying software development. The trouble is that as we look at projects, what we notice is constrained by what we know to notice. We learn to distinguish distinct and separable things in the extremely rich stream of experience flowing over us, and we pull those things out of the stream for examination. To the extent that we lack various key distinctions, we overlook things that are right in front of us. We anchor the distinctions in our memories with words and use those words to reflect on our experiences. To the extent that we lack words to anchor the distinctions, we lack the ability to pull our memories into our conversations and the ability to construct meaningful strategies for dealing with the future ...»