Deltas: Documenting Small, Frequent Changes

I remembered how to effectively make multiple, technical changes that can conflate a fix.  The sequence is: make a small change, test the expected result, troubleshoot an (unexpected) failed change, retest (possibly by reverting), document what worked, and extract a working template.  These steps require:

1. knowledge of the system or application
2. quick and dirty testing environment
3. easy documentation system
4. version control system

In today's case, I knew JBoss/Wildfly (but didn't recall all its dependencies and states), I was connected remotely to a test environment in AWS, I was writing notes and steps in a Confluence Wiki page, and I committed working versions to Git.  It was critical that I could test changes quickly from anywhere and share those changes with coworkers.  These tools and this sequence enabled me to power through several changes in a few hours so I'll keep using them.