The Power of Starting Small

The power of starting small: One of the best ways to get more done in software engineering (and in many other fields) is simple: get started and keep it small at first.

I have seen many projects get delayed or even fail because of complicated integrations that take a long time.

Even worse, there is so often much value wasted by not delivering a small part of a project early.

I’ll give you an example of this that I’ve seen twice, at different companies, with automated end-to-end tests.

In the best case, engineers get a list of critical user journeys to test from Product. Then they get to work, set up the project with the best tool for the job, and quickly start running the first tests on their development machine. So far, so good.

But this is where things go wrong: they continue developing the whole test suite, handling complex scenarios and data management. Then, after the whole suite is developed, they start integrating it into CI/CD systems (also best case scenario), but quickly hit roadblocks with rate limiting, tests flagged as suspicious bot activity and, perhaps, tests flakiness. This means they have to spend a lot of time fixing all these issues before finally delivering a working project that adds value to your business.

Imagine if, after the first tests validating that users can sign up and log in, they started integrating everything. They might still encounter issues, but far less than before. They could deliver this first part end-to-end much more quickly and already cover one of the most important parts of your business.

So start small. :)