Take a Breath

At some point during the evening, Mark turned to me and said "Wow, you really do take that small of steps while developing. Do you do that all the time?"

The answer is ... it depends.

If I'm in some well understood portion of the code, I will tend to do more between running the unit tests. If I get stuck, or if I start to have problems, then it is time to slow down and take smaller steps.

But even while I am taking large steps, I don't write (new) code unless there is a broken unit test.

I find that taking small steps really helps. But in order for small steps to work, you need ...

Fast tests! I get impatient of my tests take over 10 seconds.
A good environment that facilitates moving between test files, sources files and running the tests.

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