Baby step principle

Simplicity can be very powerful when properly harnessed. I have found — in perceived ‘no progress’ situation, a good strategy often is to apply ‘The baby step principle’. You may think big, but take a single, small step at a time — picture the baby who is learning to walk. Here is short summary of the principle as applied to software programming:

The change should be so small that at a given time, you can back out if it does not work. It also means, that you should be able to verify whether the change worked as expected or not.

We get stuck because we can neither go forward nor backward. Baby step principle means, if things forward did not work out, we can go backward without much loss, and try something else. This is also secret of agility.

The notion of tiny-little-safe-baby-steps in context of software design , comes from writings of good old Mr. Kent Beck.