Agile Release Planning

Online Course

Learn a lightweight, seven-step process for doing effective—and appropriate—Agile planning at the release and project levels.

Get started for $1

About Agile Release Planning

  Duration: 2h 54m
  Resources: Workbook, Practices Paper, Burndown Chart, Quizzes

Expectations about deliverables don’t disappear just because we’re using Agile development approaches. We need to deliver value repeatedly. But how do we choose from among our product backlog items to make sure we’re delivering that value? And how do we know how long it will take us to create each incremental release we envision? Finally, how do we communicate and monitor those releases?

This course describes a very specific, lightweight process for Agile release planning, beginning with “Step 1: Creating the Preliminary Product Backlog,” continuing with prioritization, decomposition, visualization, and estimation, and ending with “Step 6: Creating the Release Plan” and “Step 7: Tracking Progress.” You’ll learn an easily repeatable process for delivering value that will help your team work on the right things and prevent it from becoming a black box. The course also includes a “bonus” section covering multiteam release planning to help with release planning at scale.

Ask us about our virtual or in-person options for this course.

After you complete this course, you’ll be able to

  • Decompose big-picture items (features or capabilities) into actionable, prioritized backlog items
  • Estimate backlog items quickly and accurately (using t-shirt sizing, story point estimation, and other methods)
  • Identify and solve for technical and cross-team dependencies (using user story mapping)
  • Create a release plan
  • Track the release’s progress and forecast completion accurately

Your instructors—Jenny Stuart and Melvin Perez-Cedano—have designed this course to help you deal with some critical yet very common software development problems. As consultants at Construx, they’ve developed solutions for hundreds of teams dealing with these issues:

  • Your team can’t see the big picture of what you’re building, how long it’s going to take, and how much it’s going to cost.
  • The wasted effort of building extraneous features is delaying the delivery of real value to your customers.
  • Your product’s technical dependencies are unclear and are limiting your team’s ability to maintain a sustainable pace.
  • Risks that could have been resolved or mitigated if they had been faced proactively are jeopardizing the project.
  • Poor coordination among the teams and individual contributors is leading to delays due to avoidable unavailability.

This course is for developers using Agile methodologies who need to plan their work above the day or iteration levels in order to repeatedly and predictably deliver releases valuable to their customers.

Agile Requirements The course describes developing requirements in Agile scenarios, including the following techniques: using the Agile Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), story mapping to define project scope, writing user stories, sizing stories (agile estimation), and developing acceptance criteria for user stories.

Agile Planning and Estimation With sections designed specifically for the Scrum team and for the leadership team, the course’s multiple-audience approach leads to improved communication between the engineering and business sides of the company. Both teams gain mutual understanding by seeing the bigger picture and knowing which planning and estimation techniques each team is using.

Your Instructors

Jenny Stuart
VP of Consulting

Melvin Perez-Cedano
Senior Agile Coach

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