Skip to content
Zack Build

Dev Loop

We use the term “dev loop” for routine activities of a software developer or other users of our build system.

Speeding up the dev loop vastly improves the whole developer experience. Some direct advantages are:

  1. Quick Feedback: By getting feedback on their changes quickly, developers have less context switches resulting in less errors.
  2. Quick Bugfixes: Bug fixes can get rolled out quickly.

Inner Dev Loop

The “inner dev loop” is what the developer runs with high-frequency, often on his own device, during development:

  1. Adding/modifying some source code.
  2. Potentially getting real time IDE feedback.
  3. Building code.
  4. Running affected tests.
  5. Understanding errors/warnings and act on them.

Outer Dev Loop

The “outer dev loop” is what code changes need to go through until being deployed to production:

  1. Creating a change/pull request.
  2. Getting CI feedback.
  3. Maybe deploying the change for manual testing.
  4. Getting a review of other developers.
  5. Merging the change to the development branch after validating it again, rebased on latest changes.
  6. Getting the change through various deployment stages to production.