Agile is in many ways a synonym for task switching, and I think it’s a fairly widely accepted principle that switching incurs costs. We all seem to at least implicitly agree there is some balance to be had between the costs of switching and the costs of rigidity, as we have as an industry accepted agile as gospel. We’ve generally seemed to have settled on 1-5 story points as the idealized unit of work and 1-2 weeks as the idealized sprint time, but over the last few days, I’ve been thinking, that seems like something that should be quantifiable and optimizable rather than just done by gut and feel.

If thought of as a machine, there’s a slider that selects a point between 2 extremes. On 1 side, everyone on a team does 1 narrowly defined task over and over; on the other, everyone is switching tasks instantaneously and continuously. What’s the function that defines the relationship between moving that slider and business outcomes? What variables are even in that function? How do we even start to tell if we’re optimizing that function given the methodologies we currently have?

This isn’t a typical blog post, I suppose. I’m not giving solutions here, just posing a set of questions that seems interesting to me. I’d really love to hear what others had to say, and if not too presumptuous, start a conversation.