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You're reading from The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook

Product typeBook

Published inApr 2013

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781849688024

Edition1st Edition

Concepts

Agile

Author (1)

Stacia Viscardi

Chapter 2. Release Planning – Tuning Product Development

People in traditional projects attempt to define and then control scope during the project, while Agile teams approach the problem differently: figure out enough to get started, embrace changes, and then proceed as the way opens. Agile teams, by definition, try to respond to changing market or user needs as soon as those needs are discovered, yet business requires them to plan ahead from time to time. Agile teams know that they cannot predict a project's outcome, so they use pragmatic planning approaches to tune their development efforts to the latest and greatest needs. This is somewhat like what your local meteorologist does every night on the six o'clock news—his next-day forecast is usually spot on, but the seventh day is always off! Unfortunately, no team (or weatherman) can predict the future, which is why I keep a backup umbrella in my car.

The traditional project metrics of all planned scope, on budget, and by the deadline don...

Start at the beginning – product backlog

A product backlog is an ordered list of features or work to be implemented in a product. It could be infinite in length; that is, there could always be new requirements for a product. The product owner is an actual customer or an internal representation thereof (think of an iPad product owner representing many millions of users), maintains, updates, administers, and ranks the product backlog. Based on market research, a product vision statement, industry analytics, technical innovations, or simply ideas to test, the product backlog represents the product owner's most valuable ideas and features for a product.

Note

Once the team has selected, planned, and committed product backlog items to a sprint, the product owner cannot make any changes to those items. However, the product owner is given free reign to change the priority, requirements, and even remove any product backlog item that hasn't been committed and planned in a sprint. This simple game rule...

Release planning – when will you set your features free?

So now we have a product backlog. What next? Well, if you're not required to forecast a set of functionality for a future point in time, then the team should simply start working by pulling items from the top of the backlog to implement. When an organization requires a team to forecast a set of scope for a set period of time, they will, however need to do release planning.

Timing of releases and release planning

Releases themselves should occur at a point in time designated by the product owner when he has evaluated the return on investment and determined that a set of features should be made available to customers or users. The product owner, likely, will have an idea of release timeframes before any work has begun (I needed it yesterday!). There is a frequency at which customers or users would like to see new features, and it is the product owner's responsibility to determine this cadence. For example, in the map application on my...

Summary

Release planning is not a crystal ball into which someone can look and predict the outcome of a project. Rather, release planning provides a way for the team and product owner to tune committed work to users' and customers' needs without planning for too much detail too soon. The team and product owner must revisit the release plan periodically during the release and work together to deliver features that delight customers.

In Chapter 3, Sprint Planning – Fine-tune the Sprint Commitment, we will discuss how the team works with the product owner to create a good short-term plan for one sprint.

Recommended reading

Cohn, Mike (2009), User Stories Applied, Pearson Education
Pichler, Roman (2010), Agile Product Management with Scrum, Pearson Education
Reis, Eric (2011), Lean Startup, Crown Business
Website of Carolyn Snyder, author of Paper Prototyping: http://www.paperprototyping.com/
UXPin (paper prototyping kits): www.uxpin.com
Tabaka, Jean (2006), Collaboration Explained, Pearson Education

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Author (1)

Stacia Viscardi

Stacia Viscardi is an Agile coach, Certified Scrum Trainer, and organizational transformation expert, devoted to creating energized and excited teams that delight their customers and inspire others. With humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas, Stacia found her niche as a Manufacturing Project Manager in the early nineties; she landed in the technology world in 1999 and never looked back. In 2003 she became the sixty-second Certified ScrumMaster (there are now over 200,000!), and founded AgileEvolution in 2006. She has helped companies such as Cisco Systems, Martha Stewart Living, Primavera, DoubleClick, Google, Razorfish, MyPublisher, Washington Post, and many others find their way to agility. Co-author of the Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility, Stacia has taught Agile in 17 countries and is active in the ScrumAlliance as a CST and trusted community advisor. When she is not doing Agile stuff, she is training for a marathon or other long race or spending cozy nights on the sofa with her husband Chris, and dogs Jax and Cobi. A self-proclaimed process nerd, she loves helping teams and organizations discover the Scrum/XP/Lean mash-ups that enables focused, flexible, and fast delivery of products. She created the blog HelloScrum to share knowledge, tips, and tricks with Scrum practitioners, and co-founded KnowAgile, an Agile testing website. Stacia has co-authored The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility with Michele Sliger (2008, Addison-Wesley).
Read more about Stacia Viscardi

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