The Inner Loop Is Eating The Outer Loop

Source: DZone DevOps

Inner Loop vs. Outer Loop

For as long as most of us have been building software, there has been a clean split in the development lifecycle: the inner loop and the outer loop.

The inner loop is where a developer lives day to day—write code, run it locally, check if it works, iterate. It is fast, tight, and personal.

The outer loop is everything after you push: continuous integration pipelines, integration tests, staging deployments, and code review. It is comprehensive but slow, and for good reason. Running your entire test suite against every keystroke would be insane.

So we optimized: fast feedback locally, thorough validation later.