Dude, Where's Our Release Plan?
Projects with a healthy, living and visible release plans have a vehicle to evaluate cross cutting investments like ubiquitous product language, incremental ROI validation, systemic issues, usability, and more. Projects with weak release plans (or planning) may do well in any one iteration, but still fail to establish value based planning across iterations, which inevitably can lead to weak or limited delivery of product value. This interactive session will present the value and techniques associated with using iteration based feedback and metrics to direct and redirect continuous release planning.
There are many agile projects that under value the importance of release planning. While iterative development helps validate your direction, many agile communities excel at iteration planning but fail to nurture living release plans. This often leads to varying problems like poor product vision or failure to realize real costs associated with releasing new version of the product.
The session will contain presentation, anecdotal evidence, and small and large group exercises. The participants will leave with a host of tools and ideas for creating and sustaining a living release plan.
This session will be highly interactive and ask participants to share how they use, misuse, or neglect release planning. Participants will be challenged to think and rethink their ideas of release planning and the value it offers.
The working outline is:
- What is Release Planning? Why do it? (group exercise)
- The Value(s) of Release Planning (presentation)
- The Lesser Named Values (anecdotes and small group exercise)
- Top 5 Reasons For Undervaluing Release Planning (presentation / anecdotes)
- Where is Your Release Plan(ing)? (small group exercise)
- Indicators: Good Vibes and Groove Killers (presentation)
- Putting It All Together: Avoiding The Pitfalls (small group exercise)
- Group review / discussion (group exercise)
The Session Tests (the intended learnings):
- Release planning provides much more that the release plan itself
- The community starts building a common domain language during release planning
- Discovering new stories and other unknowns are key parts of release planning
- Aspects of systems or products are served well by the wider scope of release planning
- Release plans should be periodically reviewed and re-planned to validate product ROI
- Dropping release planning happens and working without a release plan is often dangerous
- There are tangible anti-planning patterns that are avoidable if monitored
- Release planning helps bond communities