Find your feedback loop and then try to find ways to increase it's it's ability to report feedback sooner.

Feedback can come in many ways, and no matter what that feedback loop is, finding ways to increase it's ability to get you feedback sooner is generally going to help you in the long run.

If you think of a typical software development lifecycle, you can find ways to improve feedback loops in nearly all levels of the process. In a aesign phase, reviewing designs with the client/steakholder is one way to get feedback. During development you can get feedback from your unit tests or compiler or even your editors, when you manually review changes made in the application, or especially code reviews with other developers. QA's main purpose is to create a solid feedback loop about quality and while it's generally a slower feedback loop than other forms feedback it is extremly important and should generally not be overlooked or ignored. Once the app is in the wild, customers give feedback and your applications can report various types of feedback such as crashes or customer sign-up numbers.

You've likely heard of the idea of Failing Fast (if not, you should). In the end, failing fast is a great a type of feedback.

Try pair programming, having a partner watch for and point out silly mistakes, or propose alternative approaches. The instant feedback is hugely beneficial. Leverage the feedback of other tools such as a compiler, unit tests, or manual testing.

When working with a new code library or dependency, don't make assumptions about how something works, even though the principle of least astonishment is nice to follow, don't assume that's how it works. Prove it, test it, fail fast or gather feedback on the exercise.

Test assumptions and prove to yourself that the assumptions are either right or wrong. This could come down to how you expect a library function to behave for certain inputs, or this could apply to how you think the customer wanted you to implement a feature.

Don't wait till the product is shipped to learn that's not what your customer asked for, try and find out ways to get that feedback sooner. Send it to some early adopters or beta users.

No matter what area of the process you work in or with, take a step back and look at your current feedback loops, how can you inject new feedback loops or improve the speed at which existing feedback loops can reach you. Can you turn a nightly build into an hourly build or check-in build (or auto-build on file save)? Of course too much feedback can get overwhelming, so take the ones that provide the most value to you and your process and find ways to optimize them.

Happy Feedback!