David Alfaro: Scrum Costa Rica » product http://agilenature.com Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:31:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 Scrum Release Planning http://agilenature.com/2009/04/14/scrum-release-planning/ http://agilenature.com/2009/04/14/scrum-release-planning/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:45:39 +0000 David Alfaro http://agilenature.com/?p=104 First of all, I don’t believe there’s something like Scrum Release Planning. Let me get this straight: Scrum is the alternative for traditional Project Management, it is not the substitution of Product Management.  The PO is immediate responsible for setting up a Release Plan, and the ScrumMaster is responsible for requiring the Release Plan.

By the way, remember that the Product Owner role is a subset of the Product Manager. That is, the Product Manager is the best fit for being the Product Owner.

That said, what you are going to see in ScrumMaster trainings are the practices and values the ScrumMaster has to monitor thought the Sprints. I had the luck to have a short discussion about the Agile Release Planning during my training three years ago, but as far as I know that was an extra.

I hihgly recommend therefore this couple of posts about agile release planning:

Release Planning

Agile Release Planning

“Maximizing Value with Agile Release Planning” Recording

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]]> http://agilenature.com/2009/04/14/scrum-release-planning/feed/ 2 Six Practices to deal with assumptions, risks and priorities http://agilenature.com/2009/04/08/six-practices-to-deal-with-assumptions-risks-and-priorities/ http://agilenature.com/2009/04/08/six-practices-to-deal-with-assumptions-risks-and-priorities/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:22:37 +0000 David Alfaro http://agilenature.com/?p=101 In the making of a new product, you have some very few proven assumptions (realities) and a lot of not proven ones. That’s good because those assumptions gives an interpretation of reality, a set of axioms that serve as a starting point to build that product that will change the world, as you are assuming it is.

Failure appears when something you assumed proved to be false. That’s the time to review our axioms, with the honest willingness to change them if necessary.

For a Product Management perspective, the longer you wait to realize an assumption is false, the more expensive it is to change what you built over that assumption.

The “cost of changing what was built” as time passes and the probability of the happening that in fact it was a bad assumption is what I understand as risk.

Here my six practices to embrace and live comfortably with assumptions, risks and priorities:

  1. Associate a risk numeric value to each assumption.
  2. Associate a risk description and the correspondent assumption to each User Story.
  3. Before starting the product development, be sure to have cleared all the higher market, platform, technology risks.
    • Refine your persona.
    • Talk A LOT with users fitting your persona.
    • Continue refining your persona in the process of talking.
    • Review market penetration of the platform and technology used by your product.
    • Review market trends.
    • Review the Business Strategy of your company.
  4. Star developing those User Stories with higher Business Value and those with the higher risk associated. Answer the tougher questions first.
  5. Pay consulting services to a Subject Matter Expert to review the iterations increments. This is a review process independent, not related to the Team Review Meeting. Remember the team presents the increments to the Product Owner, not to the SME, at least of course the PO is the SME.
  6. Start a customer base, even when you have only the concept of the product.

Further Reading

Brutal Prioritization in Agile: cut costs by NOT building the fluff

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