Hi All,
I am looking for a some sort of authoritative guide from SAP on ECC Transport Best Practices, especially around merging/combining/accumulating multiple transports into fewer ones. We are a very large project, but we haven't figured out the CVSs like ChaRm 
so we still deal with individual transports.
The reason I am asking this is that we some development leads on our project that insist that ALL transports that leave Development system must be imported into Production. They claim this the SAP best practice. An SAP consulting review of our system also left a vague note that "We are orphaning transports". This could mean that 1. either we are not importing all the stuff that leaves Dev system 2. or we are not keeping track of our code changes across all environments. Proponents of "All transports must get to PRD" are interpreting this as "1".
I have my team cumulate transport for subsequent changes into newer transport and only take the newest Transport to Production. The continuous rolling of old Transport into new one using SE01 "Include Objects" options ensures that all changes part of current development are in a single TR. Fewer transports mean fewer housekeeping across all systems, and less chances of something going out of sequence or missed out. This is for Workbench Transports only. I understand Config transports could get a little tricky with rolling in.
If you can't point me to a link, what is your take on "Send everything to Prod" vs. "Combine changes into fewer Transports"? I can't think of any software packaging methodology that suggests putting everything, including some junk/crap, into production build. I have looked at SAP enhancement packs, SPS, and Notes. I haven't found any evidence of SAP including older buggy code in what it releases to its customers.
Thank you all!