15.4. Evolution and Revolution

In software design and development, what is your approach: evolution or revolution?

Larry: I'm a bear-of-very-little-brain in some ways, so I personally take an evolutionary approach when I'm programming. When developing a Perl program I typically make a change, run it, make another change, with a cycle time of maybe 30 seconds. I don't spend much time debugging because it's usually pretty obvious whether the last thing I did was right or wrong. Every now and then I refactor, but that also tends to be evolutionary, alternating between making a change and making sure that nothing really changed.