Chapter 10. Initial Release Planning

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

—Winston Churchill

In all but the most trivial of situations some sort of initial planning will be involved on a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) project. When that planning occurs, the level of detail involved and who does it varies depending on your situation. An important philosophy is that the value is in the planning itself, not in the actual plan that gets produced. Your primary goal should be to think things through before you do them, not to produce documentation describing what you think you’re going to do. In general, your planning efforts should address schedule, cost, and work allocations. Naturally these issues are affected by the scope of what you’re trying to achieve and your strategy for doing so, hence your initial plan, initial requirements, and initial architectural strategy will evolve in step with one another.