There is an old, but good article posted by Tariq Bell about the inner workings of the AX Batch framework. When you are working with Dev and Test instances and enable/disable the Batch flag in Server configuration, it might take a while before your tasks are starting to run. There is a simple trick to force executing batch jobs.

As explained in the reference article, each batch task and the framework itself triggers this call, when they are ready to finish execution and a new task needs to be picked up. You could just write a simple job and trigger it with a Menu Item on Server side to kick off a batch job earlier.

static void Job1(Args _args)
{
    BatchRun::serverGetNextTask('01@YOURSERVERNAME');
}

Providing the correct instance number and the server name is required in order to force executing batch jobs.

We have used this method in part to change the batch framework itself, and allow execution of jobs faster than the typical 1 minute schedule. I wanted to post about those findings, but unfortunately that code is not compatible with more recent versions of AX 2012 R3 CU10+, due to Microsoft introducing the new SP_GETAPPLOCK calls in the framework.