I'm curious how many software engineers work this way — i.e. you need to make a big change, and you can determine a sequential order in which to make changes?
My working style is mostly jumping back-and-forth across all the relevant files and tests as I go, realizing new things that I need to change, and iterating until it all works end-to-end.
Am I the outlier, or is Maiao's expected workflow the outlier?
Sometimes this doesn’t happen in which case you end up need to split your commit at the end. This is where git utterly fails. You end up needing git split and git absorb to make this productive.
Git split let’s you select which chunks in a commit should belong to it and then splits that into a commit and then you do it again and again until you have lots of commits. You’ll still need to probably test each one but the majority of the work is done
Git absorb takes changes on the top of your stack and magically finds which commit in your stack the each chunk should belong to and amends it to the right commit
You also need git branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless as it lets you move up and down the stack without needing to remember so much git arcana.
Git gui, which is part of the vanilla git distribution, already allows you to take a hunk out of an existing commit.
git absorb does sound like a nice convenience though.
In my experience, that means days of increased effort - async reviews, more explanation needed for people who are unfamiliar with the code, an additional coordination layer of explaining where we are and where we’re going, increased probability of bike shedding, and waiting for your turn to get into CI.
Not saying you shouldn’t make that trade-off: if you feel you should, you probably should. But we need to be clear about the trade offs, to better understand when that makes sense.