Release Planning for Developers – Part 2

Length of Sprint

The length of the sprint should be determined at the beginning of development, and typically needs to remain the constant throughout a project. This enables the Scrum Team to accurately track and analyze the Sprint Velocity in order to determine the development pace.

The key to determining the length of sprints is matching granular control with the size of tasks. Developers are the best role in determining this balance. Most developers have an intuition about how long a request might take. By looking at the description of a feature, and comparing it with related features that are already completed, developers can estimate the size and complexity of the task. They may also decompose the tasks into smaller packets of work to further increase the accuracy of their estimates.

Release Strategies

Once the release plan is created, stakeholders know when to expect the features of a project. However, they must then decide on a release strategy. Different release strategies work for different teams, but there are two main focuses. The scrum team can either go with a functionality driven release strategy, or a date driven strategy.

Functionality Driven

A functionality driven release strategy focuses on getting certain features into each release. If stakeholders need certain key components quickly, they may prefer this method. Smaller and less important features may be pushed back, and take longer, but the Scrum team will get the most important features into the product and release it to the stakeholders as quickly as possible.

Date Driven

If stakeholders have a preference for having new features delivered regularly in a certain time frame, a date driven release strategy may be a better fit. Customers who have certain schedules in their own environment may need releases to fall into certain time windows. Perhaps this coincides with training periods or some other static time frame. In any case, these stakeholders are willing to have functionality reduced or split up, in order to meet the strict date requirements. Developers are valuable in this strategy as well, since they know how to maximize value in short release periods. If the scrum team keeps to the development pace, features should be finished just before the product is released to stakeholders.

Release planning covers a lot of factors, and developers are important in every part of the process. From creating the release plan to deciding on release strategies, the knowledge of a developer is extremely valuable. Developers know how long tasks should take, how they fit together, and how to maximize value to the stakeholders on a time frame.

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