The battle over batching and batch size has been going on for decades in the world of lean manufacturing. An example quote:
"American manufacturing managers traditionally considered setup costs as a necessary evil and made little or no effort to reduce them."
"The lean/JIT philosophy suggests that a firm should eliminate any reliance upon the [Economic Order Quantity] formula and seek the ideal production quantity of one. Of course, a lot size of one is not always feasible, but it is a goal used to focus attention on the concept of rapid adjustments and flexibility. Naturally, a reduction in inventory levels means an increase in setups or orders, so the responsibility rests with production to make every effort to reduce setup time and setup costs."
The key Lean insight here is to lower setup costs for tasks to as close to zero as possible. An example of that might be working to lower the costs of doing making a build from your source code. If you can get that cost close to zero, then you are much more likely to see regular code check ins.
This lean principle is tremendously useful in pushing you towards more agile development. If you can lower the batch size of your feature releases to a much smaller batch size (or even one, i.e. continuous deployment), that can have huge benefits.
"American manufacturing managers traditionally considered setup costs as a necessary evil and made little or no effort to reduce them."
"The lean/JIT philosophy suggests that a firm should eliminate any reliance upon the [Economic Order Quantity] formula and seek the ideal production quantity of one. Of course, a lot size of one is not always feasible, but it is a goal used to focus attention on the concept of rapid adjustments and flexibility. Naturally, a reduction in inventory levels means an increase in setups or orders, so the responsibility rests with production to make every effort to reduce setup time and setup costs."
http://www.enotes.com/management-encyclopedia/lean-manufactu...
The key Lean insight here is to lower setup costs for tasks to as close to zero as possible. An example of that might be working to lower the costs of doing making a build from your source code. If you can get that cost close to zero, then you are much more likely to see regular code check ins.
This lean principle is tremendously useful in pushing you towards more agile development. If you can lower the batch size of your feature releases to a much smaller batch size (or even one, i.e. continuous deployment), that can have huge benefits.