Before I get back to Ray Immelman's tribal ideas, I want to post just one final thought from my trip to Japan - Small Batch Sizes.

In Japan everything is sold in small batches - even bread is sold in one third and one half loaf sizes. Cereal is sold in 175g boxes. That's barely enough for 3 adult servings! Equally, milk in small cartons and so forth. The Japanese are used to the idea of making frequent small grocery transactions. The transaction cost is minimized by the fact that they are probably walking past the store on the way home from the train station. To buy in larger batches is inconceivable. The store couldn't afford to be any bigger because property is expensive. The buyer would need a car to carry larger amounts or to arrange for home delivery. She'd need but couldn't afford a bigger house with a large kitchen to store everything. Property is expensive. Japanese fridges are dinky little models design for small batches of food to fit in small kitchens.

Now compare this to America, where I know people who drive long distances to Costco to buy large batches of milk at bulk prices - to save a few cents, which pays for the gas they burned in the SUV to drive to the store ;-) The large batch of milk will disappear into the vastness of the fridge and if there isn't enough room then there is a bigger one in the basement or garage (normally stocked with beer) for the overflow. American culture is all about big batches and infrequent transactions, minimizing the transaction cost. Stack'em high! Sell'em cheap! For the home owner this can be great. I love being able to go to stores with large inventories and find exactly what I want, when I want it. But it is not necessarily good business sense. I think the size of America, its relatively low population density and its recent farming heritage make it prone to the concept of big batches. After all when you had to drive the horse and wagon 20 miles to the nearest store on a dirt track road, you didn't want to do it too often. Many people I've worked with over the last 5 years are either the children or the grand children of farmers with homesteads out on the great plains. Out there, big batches make sense. Big batches are embedded in the culture.

As I've gotten older I've become acutely aware of how my own upbringing and culture affect me and my thinking. It's not all good. Protestant work ethic is all very well but there is a dark side to Scotland's Calvinist culture that I have trouble controlling at times.

I wonder therefore how much American culture shaped traditional software engineering advice. Are small batches of requirements done in short iterations antithetical to American culture? Or is it just plain economics and our human ability to seek efficiency and optimize the transaction cost by reducing the number of transactions that encourages us naturally to want to make product releases too large, to want to do too much planning and too much analysis? Or is it something else, for example, my intellectual efficiency idea? Comments, please...