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Jesse Phillips
Jesse Phillips

Posted on

Why did this change fix the issue?

When I posted about rebase I noted that understanding a commit is different from understanding how a commit addressed an issue.

I'm not saying you shouldn't seek to learn such an answer. But usually when you're in this situation you've tried 15 other things some of which may have been committed.

So here is the hard part, you need to identify the minimal modification to address your issue. This is not to say the other changes were not valuable or important, or even unnecessary to make the change which fixed the issue; what it is saying is it is important to talk to what each change did to benefit the product.

I've done it, made so many changes, including ones I didn't know I was making and it leads me to the wrong conclusion about other changes I've made.

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bretthancox profile image
bretthancox

This is a similar issue faced at the level of Product Management (obviously a lot less granular). You have a client facing a challenge. There is an obvious, gold-plated solution. Now, you need to pick apart the challenge they face and how they intend to face it and look for the real root cause. The client may already know, and the identified solution may be the right one, but there are enough instances where they have overlooked the real problem that you can narrow down a product change to the smallest piece that achieves their desired outcome.