WTH are small batches

Published on Jul 10, 2018

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

WTH are small batches

The importance of keeping work small
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WTH are batches anyways?

The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process.

For software, the easiest batch to see is code. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work.

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A few hours of coding is enough to produce a viable batch.

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Give me benefits.

sure thing!

Small batches mean fast feedback

"If you're not used to working in this way, it may seem annoying to get interrupted so soon after you were "done" with something, instead of just working it all out by yourself. But these interruptions are actually much more efficient when you get them soon, because you're that much more likely to remember what you were working on."

Small batches mean problems are instantly localized

Think about the last time you were called upon to debug a problem like that. How much of the time you spent debugging was actually dedicated to fixing the problem, compared to the time it took to track down where the bug originated?
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Small batches reduce risk. Like, Heaps.

Integration problems happen when two people make incompatible changes to some part of the system.
The smaller the batch size, the sooner these kinds of errors are caught, and the easier the integration is. When operating with continuous deployment, it's almost impossible to have integration conflicts.

Small batches in Agile

Story splitting

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