Agile Planning

Summary

• Planning is something we all do naturally. It is deciding in advance what we want, what it will take, in what order and what we will do if things change, then revising those decisions as we learn.
• Many Scrum teams have lost the habit of planning beyond the next sprint. That habit came from web and consumer software, where deploying and releasing are the same thing. Professional software is different: its users need a release timeline they trust and have agreed to.
• An agile plan is a forecast, not a baseline. It is detailed where knowledge is good, coarse where it is not, expressed as a range, and updated every sprint.
• The first release should be a walking skeleton: the thinnest path that crosses every part of the product end to end. It proves the architecture, the integration between teams and, in regulated software, the traceability that everything else depends on.
• With several teams, the plan is shaped less by the amount of work than by the dependencies between teams. The best dependencies are the ones the product's structure removes before any planning starts.