Tidy First?

Chapter 18. Batch Sizes

How much tidying should you do before integrating and deploying?

Well, there are a couple of considerations:

• How much tidying do you need to do? That is, if we define “tidying” as structural changes supporting the next behavior change, then how many structural changes do you need to make to support the next behavior change? Tidying is not looking toward a far-ahead future. Tidying meets an immediate need. (We’ll talk about this more when we talk about first/after/later, in Chapter 21.)

• How much tidying will be easy to integrate and deploy?

In Chapter 16, I discussed not mixing tidying and behavior changes. But we still have the open question of whether we batch all our tidyings together, do them all separately, or something in between (Figure 18-1).

Figure 18-1. Structure changes batched together or separately

This puts us in a trade-off space, also known as a Goldilocks dilemma. What are the competing costs that let us evaluate what constitutes too few tidyings per batch, too many tidyings per batch, and the range of just the right number of tidyings per batch (Figure 18-2)?

Figure 18-2. Trade-off space for tidyings per batch

Figure 18-3 shows the costs that rise as we put more tidyings in a batch.

Figure 18-3. Costs that rise as batches grow ...