The Art of Agile Development

Work in Small, Reversible Steps

The easiest way to reduce waste is to reduce the amount of work you may have to throw away. This means breaking your work down into its smallest possible units and verifying them separately.

Sometimes while debugging, I see multiple problems and their solutions at once. Shotgun debugging is tempting, but if I try several different solutions simultaneously and fix the bug, I may not know which solution actually worked. This also usually leaves a mess behind. Incremental change is a better approach. I make one well-reasoned change, observe and verify its effects, and decide whether to commit to the change or revert it. I learn more and come up with better—and cleaner—solutions.

This may sound like taking baby steps, and it is. Though I can work for 10 or 15 minutes on a feature and get it mostly right, the quality of my code improves immensely when I focus on a very small part and spend time perfecting that one tiny piece before continuing. These short, quick steps build on each other; I rarely have to revert any changes.

If the step doesn’t work, I’ve spent a minute or two learning something and can backtrack a few moments to position myself to make further progress. These frequent course corrections help me get where I really want to go. Baby steps reduce the scope of possible errors to only the most recent changes, which are small and fresh in my mind.

In Practice

The desire to solve big, hairy problems is common in developers. Pair programming helps ...