Project Management Guide

Release plan is a commitment schedule and it is important to meet this commitment both for customer & organization development project. Every release starts with the release planning meeting.

Presence of the entire team, manager and member of clients must be present during the release planning meeting. Release plans are used for the creation of the iteration plans. There is a set of rules in the release planning meeting that every attendee to follow. Below are three key outcomes of release planning meeting:

1. Release Date
2. Release Goals n Objectives
3. Estimate for each Story
4. A high level schedule to achieve the release date

Purpose of the release planning meeting is that the entire team member must commit on the achieving the target within a time limits.

All business users take the business decisions and all the technical team make all the technical decisions. The main target of all the decision either technical or business is that to achieve the goal with in time limits. The key of the planning a release is knowing the team’s velocity.

All the attendees must come in the meeting with a prior preparation. It will help in run the meeting smoothly. It will also take less time. Generally Release Planning Meeting takes 4-8 hours depending upon the size of release.

Key points to discuss in the meeting are:

1. During the release planning meeting set the release end date.
2. Discuss all the points related to the current project release, so that common understanding will become between all the members of team on all the points related to the project.
3. Set the goals & objectives of the release. These should be for both developing team as well as for business users/customer.
4. During the meeting make a priority list of all the stories for the release and add only that stories which are helpful for achieving the goal.
5. The scrum team has been fully responsible for the technical part of the project, if any team member found any technical/non-technical problem which may change the time estimate or release schedule, so, that team member must have discuss that point(s) in the meeting.

Also, it is very important that decisions in the meeting should be collective. These should not be forced to any of the stakeholder.