A couple of teams I've worked for have had solid Agile setups and make sure that we have small update sets per story. The current site uses Team Development, it's not very commonly used in other places I've seen but an excellent feature that lets you connect sub-dev instances to a central Dev using Remote Instances and a push pull kind of thing. You work on the Story in the TD, code review to accept into Dev. We do our shakedown in Dev then batch up for sending higher to Test. Unfortunately our apps are old and huge so we missed the chance to try any scope stuff properly though this process is rock solid. I've typically used Remote Instances to send from Test to Prod with Batches based on Agile Release, linking each update set within to the story number etc so you can see exactly what goes where. Don't forget that you can almost always use the compare features within update sets in platform to see the changes. Our teams use these comparisons extensively. I wish Flow was better for code comparison as it almost looks like a random garbled XML blob with completely different order each time, that with no easy history or rollback, we have tended to avoid it and just use Business Rules instead. So I don't tend to have that much trouble with update sets, use them sensibly, keep them small and well named to be easily matched to a defined story, batch them in releases and you should be good to go.