Small Batch Sizes

I was reading the final chapters of The DevOps Handbook.

And I had a flash back to my first job - a paper boy.

Every week I would collect large piles of advertising materials, fold them up and deliver them to 200+ houses.

It was quite an effort to complete all that work, and I wanted to be efficient.

I remember seeing somebody else’s method for folding. They would fold all of 1 brand, all of the next brand, and so on. Finally, they would pick up one of each and fold it one more time in a bundle.

To me, I thought it was slow. So I tried another method.

I laid out all the materials, collected one of each and folded once. I cut down the time to fold all those advertisements and got into a rhythm.

Sometimes it would difficult to fold, so I’d re-arrange them and try again.

This is what flow is about; using a small batch size to get from raw materials to a finished product.

It also allows you to learn and adjust your method.

This small batch sizing actually works!

In an I.T. context, this is one of the reasons why automated pipelines are awesome. They enable our applications to be compiled, tested and deployed, moving our products closer to our customers.

Have a read of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook to hear more about these ideas.