Agile Release Planning: The Middle Time Frame

Lean and agile development methods, which emphasize planning on five different levels, can generate amazing high-level vision and long-term plans to achieve business goals. These methods also can produce plans for lower-level detailed iteration and daily planning. Yet when it comes to release planning—the middle time frames—lean-agile methods often degrade into a best guess by the team, architect, or project manager. Sarah Harper demonstrates how to use your team’s historical data to accurately predict and plan releases. In addition, she shows how you can use Monte Carlo methods to forecast releases by date or number of features. Sarah reviews cumulative flow diagrams and discusses how to interpret them to identify areas of process improvement. If your stakeholders’ capacity to implement frequent releases is small or non-existent, this session is meant for you. Leave with a game plan and new tools to put release planning on solid ground no matter how often releases come out.