Small and quick.
What is an Iteration?
We may be familiar with this term from the Agile software development idiom. It basically stands for one pass over a thing. One iteration of a loop is one execution through the loop block. Likewise, in agile-speak, one iteration can be thought of as one execution over the stories in the backlog.
Small
It is generally beneficial to keep your iterations small. This helps keep complexity down. Complexity is bad in this case because it causes confusion, and creates unknowns. When everything is known, it is predictable. Unknowns create variances that are not predictable.
When working on a piece of code, the same idea applies. If the problem can be kept small, the answer is usually easy to work out. Large problems should be broken down into smaller, more clearly defined, problems. We intuitively know that a large problem is harder than a small problem (hence the adjectives “large” and “small”).
Do the Next Right Thing
We recently just watched the second Maleficent movie. One of the common phrases in that movie is “do the next right thing”. As seen in that movie, when faced with the cumulative problems of a kingdom, the next right thing is hard to define. There are many answers, and it is not clear which ones might be any better than others.
However, when the problems are kept small, the answers become much clearer. The problem of what to do in this case is well defined. Keep is Simple. Keep it Small.