small-change
An engineering practice philosophy advocating small-grained changes. It proposes breaking large pull requests into small, semantically complete changes that can be reviewed independently, in order to reduce cognitive load, shorten feedback loops, and lower rollback costs.
Timeline (last 90 days)
A discussion thread called small-change recently appeared on Hacker News, with a title pointing directly at "Speeding up code review with small-change".
small-change advocates breaking work into several semantically complete, independently reviewable small changes rather than submitting giant PRs containing hundreds of lines of changes across multiple modules.
Small changes speed up review for reasons including lower cognitive load, shorter feedback loops and lower rollback cost.
A workable practice in practice is to first merge refactorings that do not change behavior (such as extracting functions, renaming), and then merge behavior changes.
For scenarios involving cross-module interface refactoring or large-scale migrations, forcing a split may introduce more coordination cost.
All Facts (5)
small-change advocates breaking work into several semantically complete, independently reviewable small changes rather than submitting giant PRs containing hundreds of lines of changes across multiple modules.
50%UnverifiedSmall changes speed up review for reasons including lower cognitive load, shorter feedback loops and lower rollback cost.
50%UnverifiedA workable practice in practice is to first merge refactorings that do not change behavior (such as extracting functions, renaming), and then merge behavior changes.
50%UnverifiedFor scenarios involving cross-module interface refactoring or large-scale migrations, forcing a split may introduce more coordination cost.
50%UnverifiedA discussion thread called small-change recently appeared on Hacker News, with a title pointing directly at "Speeding up code review with small-change".
50%