Release Planning

A release plan presents a roadmap of how the team intends to achieve the product vision within the project objectives and constraints identified in the project data sheet.

Agile lifecycles are both iterative and story-driven—a significant change from traditional plans that are waterfall- and task-driven. The story-driven aspect changes the primary focus of planning and executing from tasks to product features. Most traditional project management plans utilize tasks to construct work breakdown structures (WBSs) to organize work. Although experienced project leaders concentrate first on deliverables and then on the tasks necessary to create those deliverables, work- or task-driven plans often degenerate into very detailed, prescriptive plans. Any product has a set of features that customers use for some purpose. The more quickly we can link those customers to the features they have requested and get feedback on them, the more likely the product development effort will be successful.