1. 7 Winning Strategies of Effective Release
Planning – A PO Story!
Neha Kanotra
2012 September

2. Release Planning
A good plan is one that supports reliable decision making. It is better to be roughly right
than precisely wrong
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3. The Strategies
• Understand Vision • Prepare and • Inspect, Adapt and
• Groom the Backlog Participate Refine
• Prioritization • Bring Pig Picture to
the Room
• Walk the Wall
together
Pre During Post
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4. 1. Understand the Vision
Identify Product Success Criteria
Identify architectural vision
Create and Propagate Vision Statement
A shared vision
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5. 2. Groom the Backlog
Feature Driven Backlog
User Stories – the 3Cs : Clear, Concise and Crisp
I.N.V.E.S.T in User stories
Who? What? Why?
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6. 2. Groom the Backlog..Contd
Good Acceptance Criteria
State an intent and not a solution
Independent of implementation
Definition of Done
Code complete
Unit Tests written
Integration Tested
Performance Tested
Are we done yet?
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7. 3. Prioritization
Use techniques such as MoSCoW
Identify business critical features
Attach business value to each feature
Deliver Business Value
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8. 4. Prepare and Participate
Have right members on board
Have the right tool-kit in place
Time-box your meeting
Participation is the key to successful agile projects
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9. 5. Bring Big Picture to the Room
Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve?
Bridge the Gap
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10. 6. Walk the Wall together
Size and Slice your stories
Have a representative from Business
Base-line your scope through sizing
How big is it really???y?
Empower your team
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11. 7. Inspect, Adapt and Refine
Refine as knowledge increases
Let your release plan reflect reality
Communicate changes to all
stakeholders
Change is the only constant, relish it.
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12. Re-Cap
• Understand Vision • Prepare and • Inspect, Adapt and
• Groom the Backlog Participate Refine
• Prioritization • Bring Pig Picture to
the Room
• Walk the Wall
together
Pre During Post
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13. A perfect recipe
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14. Questions?
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15. Thank You
Hope it helps!