Just for my own terminology a Rung would be a powder charge weight and not how many of that weight I load or shoot.
For instance I just started testing for a new bullet and wanted to know which of 3 powders would give the best results. I have published load data for each powder from a few sources, which of course do not coincide with one another. So I loaded ladders in .3 increments from start to max.. Loading for 3 of each. One powder only produced 6 rungs, second powder produced 9 rungs and the third powder would have produced 11 rungs but I dropped the lowest and highest charges for again 9 rungs.
From 100yds. When testing I shoot one rung each round robin at individual targets all at an even horizontal line. I look for POI shift and group size of the three shots. From this I can generally tell which are in need of further evaluation and which are a waste of time. Most time I am able to find two loads adjacent to each other that are nearly identical and also usually find two "nodes", a low and a high... Then there are ones that the whole test is just junk and that bullet, powder, rifle just do not work together.
From there I load up the better ones and move out to 200yds and shoot the same way. Results are usually similar though may vary slightly.
Then from there I load the most consistent of the groups and load in .1gr... .1gr below thru .1gr above, so if the group was as simple as 23.0 to 23.3 I would then load 29.9 through 23.4gr and shoot to verify. If it verifies I load again and repeat and then compare it to the previous test.
Yes this is a lot of testing and shooting but I do this because in the end I will be shooting 20 of these each week for a score for ten weeks. I don't now or care what the FPS is or the ES and SD is I just need to know I can hold a .5MOA XRING at 200yds. I trust my loads and I especially trust my targets.
