{"id":3039,"date":"2021-02-25T14:46:07","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T13:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getnave.com\/blog\/?p=3039"},"modified":"2023-03-16T18:06:21","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T16:06:21","slug":"release-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getnave.com\/blog\/release-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"Release Planning: How to Decide How Much Work to Commit to In Your Next Release Without Counting Hours (or Story Points)"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Release planning is essential to fulfilling the expectations of both your customers and your teams. However, often the approaches we use to create a release plan are inherently unreliable.<\/p>\n

One of the senior managers that I\u2019m currently consulting came to me the other day, and said: \u201cSonya, we need these 70 items to be delivered in the next release. How should we approach that?\u201d. I quickly looked into their historical data and in a couple of minutes, I figured out that there is an 8% probability of achieving that goal. I came back to him and asked: \u201cThere is an 8% chance of that happening, are you willing to make a bet on an 8% outcome?\u201d.<\/p>\n

And I hear managers ask this question all the time: \u201cHow much work can we finish in the next sprint?\u201d or \u201cHow many items can we deliver in the next 60 days?\u201d. Deciding how much work you can commit to in your next release could be challenging if you don\u2019t have the means to make reliable decisions at your disposal.<\/p>\n

Still, there is a straightforward technique that will enable you to come up with an accurate release commitment without spending any extra time and effort.<\/p>\n

The Flaw of Traditional Approaches to Release Planning<\/h2>\n

The traditional management approaches to release planning suggest that the team should sit down together, go through the individual work items and estimate the effort needed to complete each item (either in hours or story points). Then, the times are accumulated and a margin is added on top of the total sum, in order to account for any unanticipated events.<\/p>\n

The result looks like this: \u201cWe will need approximately 15 weeks to deliver.\u201d or \u201cWe will need about 8 sprints to complete the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apart from being tremendously time and effort consuming, the main problem with traditional approaches to release planning is that they are not reliable.<\/strong> And here are just a few reasons why these methods are fragile:<\/p>\n