LDAPWiki: Iteration Planning

Overview#

Iteration Planning is for the Delivery Team to commit to the completion of a set of the highest-ranked product backlog items.

This commitment defines the Sprint Backlog and is based on the team's velocity or capacity and the length of the Iteration.

Who Is Involved?#

Iteration Planning is a collaborative effort involving these roles:

Scrum Master: Facilitates the meeting
Product Owner: Represents the detail of the product backlog items and their acceptance criteria
Delivery Team (Scrum Team): Define the tasks and effort necessary to fulfill the commitment

Before The Iteration Planning#

Before getting started, ensure:

The items in the Product Backlog backlog have been sized by the Scrum Team and assigned a relative story point value
The Product Backlog is stack ranked to reflect the priorities of the Product Owner
There is a general understanding of the acceptance criteria for these ranked Product Backlog items

Equal Opportunity Backlog #

The Product Backlog addresses new functionality and fixes to existing functionality. The order in which a Product Backlog item is scheduled is completely independent of its ancestry.

For the purpose of Iteration Planning, the important characteristics for a product backlog item are:

It is small enough to be completed in the Iteration
We can verify it has been implemented correctly

Right-Size Backlog Items#

Product Backlog items too large to be completed in an Iteration need to be split into smaller pieces. The best way to split Product Backlog items is by Business value, not by process.

If we can split a Product Backlog item so that its children deliver value, then our iterations incrementally deliver value. If you split by process, then we impact time-to-market because value is not delivered until all the children are complete.

Compound stories can be easily split through disaggregation. Complex stories present a different challenge. Bill Wake enumerates twenty techniques

Using Velocity and Capacity for Iteration Planning#

Mature teams can use Using Velocity and Capacity for Iteration Planning

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

[#1] - iteration-planning - based on information obtained 2016-12-08-
[#2] - Iteration-planning/ - based on information obtained 2019-11-14