release planning
TRANSCRIPT
i290 lean/agile product management unit 5: planning and managing releases
@jezhumble https://lapm.continuousdelivery.com/
This work © 2015 Jez Humble Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
know strategies to mitigate these limitations
be able to do old-school agile release planning
understand the limitations of release planning
meet some well-known prioritization tools
understand tools for measuring progress
learning outcomes
requirements
• What are they?
• Where do they come from?
user stories
Leaky abstractions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html
EpicTheme
Story
master story list
units?
estimation units
• jellybeans
• t-shirt sizing
• fibonacci
• function points
• COCOMO predictors
• SLIM parameters
• beware: relative vs absolute!
try it for a few weeks
tracking progress
Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) / burn up chart / turndown chart / finger diagram
stuff you didn’t know about
dependencies
stuff you didn’t think about
doesn’t actually solve the problem
it wasn’t actually what we wanted
what could possibly go wrong?
mix of skills
architecture / non-functional requirements
politics
cognitive bias
planning fallacy
Executives tend to “make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational
weighing of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to
come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed.”
Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p252.
If everything went exactly to plan…
It would be extremely embarrassing if we didn’t hit…
cost
“Even in projects with very uncertain development costs, we haven't found that those costs have a significant information
value for the investment decision… The single most important unknown is whether the project will be canceled. The next most
important variable is utilization of the system, including how quickly the system rolls out and
whether some people will use it at all.”
Douglas Hubbard | http://www.cio.com/article/119059/The_IT_Measurement_Inversion
minimize output, maximize outcome
Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping p. xlii
MoSCoW
Must have
Should have
Could have
Won’t have
kano model
further reading
http://www.agileconnection.com/article/dear-customer-truth-about-it-projects
https://pragprog.com/magazines/2013-02/estimation-is-evil
Tom DeMarco & Tim Lister, Waltzing with Bears
Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything