[wpietri]

I think the dichotomy you introduce here is false. My experience with continuous deployment is that the faster you can ship, the smaller projects get.

Instead of bundling a lot of hypotheses about possibly-valuable changes up into a big release, you focus more on the next step in the direction you're going. You release those steps one by one. (User-visibility of larger features is controlled by feature flags, but you ship and user-test in small slices.)

In that context, the whole notion of distraction is different. You have to hold a lot less state in your head. Instead that state lives in your unit tests, your acceptance tests, your backlog, and the world at large. If a given developer is releasing a couple of times a day, it's just not a big deal to find a natural stopping point, release something small, and then pick up the next slice of some longer-term effort.