Dragan Stepanović, an expert in agile methodologies and psychological safety, returns to discuss the value of small batches in team dynamics. He explains how smaller batch sizes can enhance trust and collaboration and reduce anxiety within teams. Dragan explores innovative practices like pairing and mob programming, emphasizing the benefits of role-switching. He also highlights how small batches improve feedback loops and team collaboration, and how they help manage complex adaptive systems more effectively.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Reduce Cadence for Safety
Reduce the cadence of role switching in mob programming to build psychological safety.
Frequent switching helps distribute pressure and builds trust faster.
insights INSIGHT
Batch Size in Software Teams
Batch size represents the amount of work transferred between stages, like design to development or development to QA.
Reducing pull request size to single lines reviewed live effectively becomes co-creation.
insights INSIGHT
Small Batches & Feedback
Smaller batch sizes enable faster feedback and course correction, crucial in complex systems.
This allows quicker validation of work and adjustment as needed.
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This book challenges the conventional wisdom in product development by highlighting the flaws in current practices, such as maximizing capacity utilization and eliminating variability. It introduces a new approach based on solid economics and real science, focusing on controlling invisible and unmanaged queues that undermine product development performance. The book provides 175 underlying principles organized into eight major areas, including improving economic decisions, managing queues, reducing batch size, applying WIP constraints, accelerating feedback, managing flows in the presence of variability, and decentralizing control. It draws on insights from lean manufacturing, telecommunications, and computer operating systems to create flow in product development processes, leading to significant improvements even in mature processes.
Dragan returns to talk with us about why small batch sizes are valuable, and how to apply this idea way beyond just release frequency, to pull requests, co-creation, and more.
Transcript: https://agileconversations.com/blog/smallest-batch-is-pair-dragan-pt2/
SHOW LINKS:
- Dragan:
- draganstepanovic.com
- https://twitter.com/d_stepanovic
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/dstepanovic/
- Systems Thinking: https://www.extremeuncertainty.com/an-introduction-to-systems-thinking/
- Promiscuous Pairing: https://csis.pace.edu/~grossman/dcs/XR4-PromiscuousPairing.pdf
- Theory of Constraints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints
- Donald Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6278270-the-principles-of-product-development-flow
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