Relearning the agile lessons

My coding has been getting a bit bogged down recently, and I've finally stepped back a little to try and figure out why.

One of the lessons of agile development is that things go more smoothly if one proceeds by small steps. I realize I've been trying to implement too much at once, and as a result the code has been getting away from me.

So how did this come about? In-browser unit testing can take quite a bit of organization to put in place, and I've been so flushed by the ease of throwing stuff together with jQuery that I've neglected to create sufficient unit tests, and instead relying upon manual operation testing of the user interface. For the highly-visible user interface functions, and proceeding in small steps, I was getting away with this. But my current task is to save a shuffl workspace using AtomPub. The AtomPub handlers I've developed do have fairly good unit test coverage, but the additional logic needed to assemble the workspace to be saved is also rather complex, and it is here that I'm getting bogged down.

So I'm suspending that line of development, and reorganizing the existing code into modules around which I can put in place some decent unit tests. Strangely, I now feel that things are once again moving forward at a respectable pace! This is all work that needs to be done sooner or later, and sooner seems best.