Category Archives: Release Planning

Planning Poker Tools

Updated:  9/27/2023 Mike Cohn has the phrase ‘planning poker’ registered.  So, this is acknowledgement of that. And, like Kleenex, that’s what we call the thing itself.  It no longer has a generic name. A more descriptive name is maybe ‘wide-band delphi estimation using the Fibonacci sequence.’  But planning poker and priority poker are faster.  Planning […]

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Agile Contracts – Question 1

Adela asks this question: Imagine we have a brand new project. And we must bid on it, and we want to use the agile-scrum method.  How should that work? This is a good question.  I will answer it quickly here. Too quickly.  I have partly answered it in my book, Agile Release Planning. And partly […]

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What does it mean to be ‘Ready’?

Jeffry Hesse wrote this blog post. [Link now broken.  Sorry!] It inspired me to write the post below. The new Scrum Guide says that PBIs (product backlog items) must be well-understood and granular enough for Sprint Planning. PB Refinement is the process we use to get them to Ready. Those are not quotes, but that […]

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ALN RDU: Joe’s Agile Release Planning

I had the pleasure of speaking to the Agile Leadership Network group in RDU tonight. First, there were a lot of smart people there and I enjoyed it. Here are some things I forgot to say or did not emphasize enough. 1. I have different goals from many for what we call agile release planning. […]

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Why I prefer ‘Release Plan Refactoring’ to ‘grooming’

I was just doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Canada. One of the workshops was scaling. In that context, we discussed release plan refactoring or product backlog grooming. To me, the Scrum community has many definitions of ‘product backlog grooming.’ In fact, many different words for it. And it is confusing, especially to beginners. […]

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Squirrel!!

The movie Up! is pretty good. A cartoon, with bits adults can enjoy. My kids were watching and I was also, out of the corner of my eye. There was one scene: the ‘bad dogs’ are in airplanes chasing the good guys. And someone yells: “Squirrel!” The bad dogs wreck their airplanes going after the […]

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4 Announcements

We are happy to announce 4 things. 1. New LeanPub Book: Agile Release Planning. Some of you may have seen a prior draft. It is revised now. And published. I expect to have some further revisions.  I seek your feedback. You can see it here. 2. New Workshop: Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition) This is a […]

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CBA: new Maserati vs. used Lexus??

Ladies, Please forgive me. I have to make an obvious point with some guys. And you know how guys can be. Sometimes you have to make it really obvious to them. *** We need to know the BVPs (business value points) and the SPs (Story points) of each story, so that we can do CBA […]

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Predictable project or innovative project?

Mike Cottmeyer spoke at Agile Carolinas last night. He said many good and useful things. One thing he talked about is this: What kind of project do you have?  At one extreme, do you have a project that is pure innovation?  Or, do you have a project that it completely ‘predictable’, and the main problem […]

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‘They still want us to deliver too much in too little time!’

In a class, we had a large group of people from one company.  The company is doing or getting close to doing mostly Scrum. The managers and the Board have not attended a Scrum class. In any case, ‘management’ is still asking the Teams to deliver too much in too little time.  Both say the […]

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