In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses how you can express a Scrum product backlog to provide enough planning information to management but still following the Agile principle that “welcome changes over following a plan”.
How do agile projects accurately forecast their budget when they are typically just a bunch of hippies coding without requirements or documentation? Waterfall projects are obviously much better at budgeting with all of the traditional up front design and planning, right? Anyone who has been on a waterfall project can see that this is a complete fallacy.
In this article, Vaidhyanathan Radhakrishnan discusses about the value of release planning in Scrum. This is the tool to schedule timelines for a project or a product in a complex environment where the outcome of one team is required for the other teams. The article proposes an approach to produce a release plan. This approach is based on the finding primary and secondary features in the product backlog. You can then determine whether the resources are adequate and what interdependencies exist to adjust the feature layout. The article presents the advantages of a release plan and the common disadvantages of this situation, like including ongoing or generic activities spread across the timelines which dilutes the focus of the plan.
When you explain the iterative/incremental nature of Agile, most people coming from a waterfall lifecycle say “What? No up-front planning at all?” Some Agile coaches would glibly say yes, but the truth is more complex. Sprint Zero is an Agile term for a time-boxed amount of up-front planning. During Sprint Zero, you identify value stories, get a decent backlog of user stories and you do some architectural proof-of-concepts. The trick is to balance between insufficient planning and analysis paralysis.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
Agile estimating and planning in a Scrum software development project will not prevent your boss from asking: “Will you make the date?” This video explains how to use Scrum and the “Cone of Uncertainty” to provide an answer like: “60% probability.”
Marc Löffler shares in this blog post 11 hints to improve all the Scrum meetings. He discusses daily stand-up meeting where he suggests to show colleagues what your currently working on instead of just talking about it. He also make proposals to improve the sprint planning, sprint reviews and retrospectives.
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