Do less rework

By working in smaller iterations, we don't just re-organize our work, we actually reduce the amount of work we do.

I’ve written before about the benefits of Continuous Deployment, but as I’m reading through Accelerate, another benefit was pointed out:

The strongest correlation was seen in the precentage of time spent on rework or unplanned work, including break/fix work, emergency software deployments and patches, responding to urgent audit documentation requests, and so forth.

So in essense, by working in smaller iterations, and seeing those iterations through to the end before picking up a new task, we don’t just re-organize our work, we actually reduce the amount of work we do.

I guess that might be intuitive at some level. But there are enough dots to be connected, that I think it’s worth pointing out explicitly, and I’m quite glad that authors Nicole Forsgren, PhD, et al, took the time to do the statistical analysis to show conslusively that this is how things work.

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