Anecdotally, the best developers seem to always be pushing small changes, or always have a few commits in the daily cut. Interpreting this is a bit of a chicken

Anecdotally, the best developers seem to always be pushing small changes, or always have a few commits in the daily cut. Interpreting this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem - is throughput higher because the changes are smaller, or does high implementation volume just imply more changes? Or maybe it's just a free form of advertisement: "I always see that X is pushing, so they must be good" This is a really interesting question. I agree that better developers have a natural inclination to break down large changes into small, self-supporting chunks. But I do worry that this approach can be doomed to stick at a local maximum.