Invisible Small Changes

Last modified on 2023-12-21

The Small Changes

In the world of software development, small but constant improvement (some call it refactor) is necessary to keep the software working. There is often a continious improvement team or SRE or Production support that works to continually improve the product. Some of these change may be a result of bugs, new changes in ecosystem, security patches or simply changes in user preferences. Often these changes are so small that they are not immediately visible or acknowledged by users and executives who fund the projects.

This is in stark contrast to large projects, which is immediately noticed by users. However the large projects also carry bigger risks. For the effort spent, the users may not like the overall experience.

Invisible Small Changes

For example, let us talk about a page load optimization that improved the initial load by 50ms. This change may not be a head turner as you can't extrapolate new business or user retention as a result of improved page load. The exception to the rule applies, only if the original page load times were horrendous.

The human brian can perceive big changes quickly compared to continious not directly visible improvement. If your website is something users use every day, they may not notice these continious improvement at all. Executives can't explain the results of the effort spent on this change as this change alone may not make or break user the user experience.

Are they still needed?

While we can't pinpoint success or failure to an individual change; the continious refactor is a core tenant of a well built software. Small but invisible changes are part of continious refactoring. Needless to say, a well built software is easy to maintain, upgrade and add new features.

With respect to the customer experience, while an indiviaul change may go unnoticed - users will notice the overall quality, snapiness of the product over a period of time. They may not be able to tell why they like this software better than competitors, but they may be able to tell something is different about this software and everything seems to work well.

When you add in the big changes once in a while, it's easier on the IT team to add changes on a well maintained product. Plus the users will benefit from the new expereince better when the baseline works flawlessly.