Small Steps

A working rhythm for making progress in software, distilled from Dave Farley's The Software Developers' Guidebook. The whole point: software development is learning, and you learn fastest by taking small steps, getting fast feedback, and controlling the variables so you can tell what each step actually did.

This skill is about cadence and discipline, not a specific technique. It tells you how to size a step, how to keep feedback fast, and how to judge — after each step — whether the code is still good. The single measure of "good" throughout is ease of change: quality in code is your ability to change it safely.

The core loop

Run this loop for each increment of behavior. Keep each pass small enough that you could throw it away without grief.