Importance of Release Plan in Agile

Agile practitioners utilize different agile methods to release management in the project. The major idea behind agile project management is to achieve customer satisfaction after project delivery. The agile release plan is not complete until the project is successfully delivered to the customer. Agile teams keep following the release plan at specific intervals at the end of the iterations with the customer’s consent.

Definition of Release Plan

A release plan can be defined as a roadmap to showcase how an agile team is planning to achieve the project goal; meet the project requirements; integrate the implementation plans in the project data sheet and finally achieve the overall goals of the project keeping customer’s consent in consideration.

Importance of a Release Plan

The release plan is a very important element for the product authorities as the release plan enables them to communicate with the project's stakeholders and demonstrate the potentials for a given project. The Release Plan helps an agile team member to understand the expectations that need to be achieved and the plan that the team needs to execute. It also helps the team members to work according to the plan. The importance of the release plan can be defined as a guide-post that give a definite direction to the project team.

Steps to Design a Release Plan

Initially, the owner of the product needs to demonstrate the scope, expectations, quality and other elements to customers. After the initial process, the product owner needs to estimate the requirements to meet the expectation, followed by prioritizing project needs and deciding a release date. The steps for planning a release includes:

1. Defining conditions of satisfaction
2. Estimating stories of the user
3. Choosing an iteration length
4. Estimating the Velocity
5. Prioritizing user
6. Selecting stories and deciding a release date

End of Release Plan

The Release Plan ends with finalizing requirements of the user and allotting them specific iterations. The first three iterations are well-defined with complete requirements and iteration length, the remaining iterations are kept relatively loosely defined. This practice makes the release plan flexible and allows adaptation to critical situations.