Agile Project Planning - Sprint and Iteration Planning

The following helps in release planning :

1. Establishing Project Goals
2. Creating User Stories
3. Prioritizing Stories
4. Grouping Stories
5. Planning a release date

Process of an Iteration Planning :

1. Confirming user stories
2. Decomposing User Stories into a WBS
3. Refining Tasks
4. Updating requirements based on current understanding

Cone of uncertainity : It is a decrease in variance of time estimates vs the time the project goes on for.

Vital to an Agile plan are Personas and Use Cases. Knowing what a user will find useful is vital to providing value via a software.

Each persona should have name, personality, motivation, professional details, usage and an optional picture.

Best places to develop these from are end users, customer support executives, and product managers, in the order of priority.

We should also consider personas that may want the product to fail. Primarily their reasons and motivations. These are termed as negative personas.

The personas should be developed keeping the following in mind :

1. Basing them on reality
2. Defining persona goals
3. Being specific
4. Including negative personas
5. Creating primary and secondary personas

A low fidelity prototype is desired, to stay detached from requirements.

Story Mapping

Introduced by Jeff Patton and is a way to organize and visualize the a roadmap, similar to the product roadmap. The significant difference is that it helps in understanding the requirements as the users interact with the application.

It helps us to focus on user stories, by organizing requirements based on functionality across sprints. This helps in determining current business value, and in prioritizing.

It helps in iterative planning.

Estimation methods

1. Story Points : It is an arbitrary estimation methods. It is dependent on level of complexity, level of unknowns, and effort required.
2. Ideal Days : It is more intuitive. It is how many days a developer will take to build, test and release, given ideal conditions.
3. Relative Sizing : Absolute Value is not considered. There is no exact estimation. this is done by gathering SMEs and finding out the time taken for requirements as compared to others.
4. Wideband Delphi : Developed in 1940 by Rand corporation. It is a repeatable process by collaborating with team members. It includes organizing an estimation meeting, describe what the team is estimating, tasking members to estimate individually, reviewing indiviudal results, discussing and repeating.
5. Planning Poker : Used to determine user story size, and build consensus amongst team members.
6. Affinity Estimation : T-Shirt Sizing is a derivative of this.

Value based Prioritazation

The following can be used to evaluate the prioritization :

1. ROI
2. Net present Value(NPV)
3. Internal Rate of return(IRR)
4. Compliance
5. MVP
6. Customer Perspective
   • Kano Analysis

using MoSCoW helps with this.

MoSCoW stands for Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have.

Tools

1. Kano Models
   • charting degree of implementation vs customer satisifaction generated
   • done by surveing users about how they feel about use or absence of certain features.
   • Divided into satisfiers(brings value to a customer), dissatisfier(loss of value, due to an absence of a feature), and non-essentials(no difference on presence or absence)
2. Priority Matrices
   • Uses a 2x2 matrix charting urgency vs importance
   • Estimate Value, Cost, Risk and Resizeablity.
   • Estimate Value, Cost, Risk and Resizeablity.

When doing a release plan estimation the following activities need to be fulfilled :

1. Splitting and combining user stories
2. Assigning user stories to iterations

Guideling for a good user story is that they satisfy the INVEST criteria, which stands for :

1. Independent
2. Negotiable
3. Valuable
4. Estimable
5. Small
6. Testable

Once user stories satisfies INVEST criteria, they can be assigned to Iteration Planning.