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The Agile Practice Guide
There are certain Core Practices in Agile that are important to understand. If you’re performing some or all of these core practices then you’re likely getting the benefits of Agile whether you call yourself an Agile team or not.
One of the best ways to increase your Agile knowledge is through the Agile Practice Guide from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.
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Release and Iteration Planning
When we’re release and iteration planning for Agile life cycles, two kinds of planning occur. In release planning, our business representatives establish and prioritize user stories for the release. Our business representative is that Product Owner role, but could also be another person who represents the business or the customer themselves who you’re doing the work for.
Part of their role involves gathering the requirements, and they’re defined as the Product Owner role in the Whole Team Approach. We gather that whole team together remember for an Agile project. They will establish and prioritize user stories for a release, collaborate with the team, and they’ll refine larger user stories (big pieces of work) into a collection of smaller stories, features or items. So different people can work on different cards and all up it’ll be a part of this larger release.
This then results in backlog preparation.
The backlog is the ordered list of all of the work, presented in a story form for the team. That story is usually “As a [role]”, “I want [feature]”, “So I can do [requirement]”.
That’s usually the way the story is presented from a business point of view, so that the people know exactly what to develop and what the outcome is that we’re looking for. With those stories the team facilitator role (which is that servant leadership role, the scrum master, the project manager) encourages the team to work in triads of a developer, a tester, and a product owner or a business analyst, to discuss, write and then place enough of those stories into an iteration. An iteration is that two to four week time-boxed period of work, and we want to have enough features for a first release.
By having everyone work together you’re making sure that you’re getting the requirements from the Product Owner, you’re making sure that it will be of good quality from the tester, you’re making sure that it is able to be developed and that you’ve got the development skills to actually pull this off, and all of these people will contribute to make sure that this feature, this story can be actually completed.
Then these items will go on the Kanban board and in our backlog. We’ll have all these different stories ready to be taken up by all the different people to work on and move across the board until they are completed.
Now in iteration planning we’ve got our 2 to 4 week time-boxed periods – the team selects user stories from that prioritized release backlog. So we’ve got our backlog of work and the team will be able to select those stories to work on over the iteration. They elaborate those user stories, and perform risk analysis for these are stories making sure that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed, and then they estimate the work needed for each user story. Maybe it’s going to take four hours to complete this one, maybe it’s going to take six hours to complete this one. Maybe it’s going to take two weeks to complete this one or maybe you’re looking at points so a lot of people will determine points per card and do it that way. It doesn’t matter really how you allocate or how you estimate the work but as long as you have a consistent method across the team.
Now the number of stories selected is based on an established team velocity. So Velocity is the rate at which a team can complete work. If you’re doing points – maybe a team can complete 20 points per iteration of two to four weeks we take those 20 points and we assign the cards based on how much we believe we can get done, which is our team velocity. And thus the work begins.
And that is release and iteration planning.
– David McLachlan
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