Work in Small Batches

In traditional phased approaches to software development, handoffs from dev to test or test to IT operations consist of whole releases: months worth of work by teams consisting of tens or hundreds of people.

In continuous delivery, we take the opposite approach, and try and get every change in version control as far towards release as we can, getting comprehensive feedback as rapidly as possible.

Working in small batches has many benefits. It reduces the time it takes to get feedback on our work, makes it easier to triage and remediate problems, increases efficiency and motivation, and prevents us succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy.

The reason we work in large batches is because of the large fixed cost of handing off changes. A key goal of continuous delivery is to change the economics of the software delivery process to make it economically viable to work in small batches so we can obtain the many benefits of this approach.