Release small

I just read a post by Tom Preston-Werner entitled ‘Readme-Driven Development’. This reminds me of some thoughts that I wanted to blog about.

I’ve had a few projects that I thought would be pretty simple to do but turned out to be a little more complicated than expected. Rather than hunker down and churn through the whole hairy problem in one swipe I started to compartmentalize some tricky parts. I realize that this is no different than just doing good modular software design, but the difference is that I released the code on its own and documented its API separately from the main project. The module is very small but it represents a major design decision and wrapping it up with its own readme helped to solidify the design of the overall project in my head.

Thinking a bit further, this seems like it would have advantages when proposing alternate solutions or evangelizing a certain technique used within a project in a team environment also.

Thoughts?