Manage It!

Release Planning Meetings

If you’re running an agile project, you’ll hold a release planning meeting instead of a project kickoff meeting. The release plan shows everyone (the team, sponsors, and customer) how you expect the project to evolve. You’ll plan which features you expect to deliver in an iteration. Since you’ll rerank the product backlog between iterations (see ​Manage the Product Backlog​), the details will change. At the beginning of the project, this is your best first guess.

First, the project team estimates the relative size using planning poker (see ​Planning Poker ​). The team estimates its velocity and predicts how many iterations they might need and what they think will be in an iteration. If the team is new to working in ...