Runtime metric meets developer - Building better cloud applications using feedback

A unifying theme of many ongoing trends in software engineering is a blurring of the boundaries between building and operating software products. In this paper, we explore what we consider to be the logical next step in this succession: integrating runtime monitoring data from production deployments of the software into the tools developers utilize in their daily workflows (i.e., IDEs) to enable tighter feedback loops. We refer to this notion as feedback-driven development (FDD). This more abstract FDD concept can be instantiated in various ways, ranging from IDE plugins that implement feedback-driven refactoring and code optimization to plugins that predict performance and cost implications of code changes prior to even deploying the new version of the software. We demonstrate existing proof-of-concept realizations of these ideas and illustrate our vision of the future of FDD and cloud-based software development in general. Further, we discuss the major challenges that need to be solved before FDD can achieve mainstream adoption.