There's a common belief that you have to choose between speed and quality. Move fast and break things, or move slowly and build something solid. I don't think that's true.
The fastest teams I've worked with also had the fewest bugs. The slowest had the most. Speed and quality aren't opposites—they're correlated. Here's what I've learned.
Small changes, always
Big changes are slow changes. They take longer to write, longer to review, longer to test, and longer to fix when they break. Small changes ship faster and break less.
If your PR is more than 200 lines, it's probably too big. Split it up. Ship the parts that work. Iterate.
Test the right things
100% code coverage is a vanity metric. What matters is testing the things that actually break:
- Integration points between systems
- Edge cases in business logic
- User-facing flows that can't be easily fixed
Skip testing the things that are obvious, easy to fix, or change frequently. Your time is better spent elsewhere.
Deploy constantly
The longer code sits undeployed, the scarier it becomes to deploy. Deploy every day. Deploy multiple times a day. Make deployment boring.
When deployments are routine, failures are small. When they're rare, failures are catastrophic.
Fix fast, not perfect
When something breaks, the goal is to stop the bleeding, not to solve world hunger. Fix the immediate problem. Ship the fix. Then figure out the root cause.
A quick fix that stops the bleeding is better than a perfect fix that takes three days.
Keep it simple
Simple code ships faster because it's easier to understand, easier to review, and easier to debug. Every abstraction you add is something that can break.
Before adding complexity, ask: is this actually necessary? Usually the answer is no.
Speed isn't about working more hours or cutting corners. It's about doing less unnecessary work. Build only what's needed. Test only what matters. Keep everything as simple as possible.
That's how you ship fast without breaking things.