I have been thinking about Kent Beck’s talk and ideas about moving in small safe steps. Today I had a grerat example.
I want to add a feature to the codebase which will require changes throughout the stack and several of them, possibly half a days work.
I dont necessarly have the time set aside for this in true agile fashion something more important may come up.
What i dont want to do is take everything apart and have it in a mess on my machine and leave it until the whole thing is finished before checking in. because, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!
SO. What I needed to do was break the process down into small, manegable chunks of refactoring that maybe take an hour or so each and which can be completely safely checked in without affecting the codebase.
The joy of this approach is that even if i only do the first step, and then disappear from the project, I will have made the codebase progressively slightly easier to implement the required feature upon. Maybe everyone forgets they ever wanted this feature but if someone comes back to it, even if i have left no documentation, they will look at the steps necessary to implement the new feature and there will be one less on thier list than on mine so my work was valuable.
Points are that dont need documentation.
DOnt waste time.
Dont leave loads of changes on the PC waiting to check in
Tasks easier to exlpain to others for them to take over.
If everyone had the same approach would be easy to move between pairs and others (familiar territory)
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