What is Release Planning?

The actual purpose of Release planning is to create a plan that would deliver an increment to the product. It would be done after every 2-3 months.

Why do we need a Release Planning?

Release Planning would be required in order to meet the delivery dates. Sometimes, delivery of the product would be delayed due to no proper planning. So, in order to over come this risk, Release Planning should be done. Further releases would take into account all the additional work that has to be accomplished. Here are the main reasons for Planning the release:

• A communication device
• Planning tool
• Validates value versus cost
• Sets the overall context

Who is involved?

• Scrum Master - Scrum Master would act as a facilitator for Agile Delivery team.
• Product Owner - The product owner would represent the general view of the product backlog.
• Agile Team - Agile delivery team would provide awareness on the technical feasibilities or any dependencies.
• Stakeholders - Stakeholders such as customers, program managers, subject matter experts act as advisors as the decisions are made around the Release Planning.

Pre-requisites for Planning

Pre-requisites for Release Planning would be as below -

• A ranked product backlog managed by the Product Owner.In general,five to ten features from the product backlog would be taken which the product owner feels that can be included in a release.
• Team's input about capabilities, known velocity or about any technical challenge.
• High-level vision.
• Market and Business objective.
• Acknowledgement whether new product backlog items are needed.

Patterns of Release Planning

Many of the Organizations would have their own perception and vision regarding releasing their products to customers.Some would opt to release sprint wise. Others would group the results of multiple sprints into one release.Still others would release their features once completed as often as continuous iterations.

Definition of Ready

A Release plan would be a map that would reflect the expectations about which the features would be implemented and when they would be completed. Depending in the Development strategy, it can be driven by functionality in which the primary objective is to deliver a release once a pre-determined set of functionalities are developed. Or, the release might have a predefined checkpoint. If the project is feat ure driven, sum of all the features within a release would be divided by the velocity.