Despite rumours to the contrary, there are planning activities in the agile model. In this class we’ll discuss how to plan releases, and present story mapping and impact mapping as effective tools for design, ideation and planning.

1. i290 lean/agile product management
unit 5: planning and managing releases
@jezhumble
https://lapm.continuousdelivery.com/
humble@berkeley.edu
This work © 2015 Jez Humble
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

2. 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

3. requirements
• What are they?
• Where do they come from?

4. user stories
Leaky abstractions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

5. Epic
Theme
Story

6. master story list
units?

7. estimation units
• jellybeans
• t-shirt sizing
• fibonacci
• function points
• COCOMO predictors
• SLIM parameters
• beware: relative vs absolute!

8. try it for a few weeks

9. tracking progress
Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) / burn up chart / turndown chart / finger diagram

10. 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

11. 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.

12. If everything went exactly to plan…
It would be extremely embarrassing if we didn’t hit…

14. 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

16. minimize output, maximize outcome
Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping p. xlii

17. MoSCoW
Must have
Should have
Could have
Won’t have

18. kano model

19. 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