Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Small Batches of Coordinated Work

What do we mean when we advocate “smaller batches” in agile projects? What we have in mind is a pattern of completing design, coding, testing, automation, and product documentation tasks in tight integration with each other on an on-going basis. Think in terms of hours—up to a day or two at most—to complete one of these tasks. We tend to get pushback on this concept, especially from developers, because they feel more efficient when they stay heads-down writing code for weeks or even months at a time. However, working in isolation this way produces bigger batches of code that need to be tested and documented. The more code that is completed before testing begins, the slower the overall process. This is equivalent ...