Scaling Scrum: The Chief Product Owner

We’ve begun our next phase of Agile transformation - scaling Scrum from single team efforts to larger multi-team projects within our organization.   As part of this phase, we’ll be building and delivering multi-product enterprise-ready offerings, requiring the coordination of many Scrum teams across many time-zones.  

Not unexpectedly, as we’ve delivered the first few product iterations from these larger efforts we’re faced with new challenges.  Among the biggest are coordinating backlogs between teams and resolving dependencies and integration issues.  Both issues are requiring a lot of additional time and effort, over and above the team-level Product Owner and Scrum Master efforts.   

In his book about scaling Scrum, titled The Enterprise and Scrum, Ken Schwaber states “The higher the level is, the harder the Product Owner’s and Scrum Master’s job is.”  This is an important point to recognize and deal with: as you expand the size and scope of a product, as you “scale up”, more work is required for those holding the key roles in Scrum. Though this is a huge challenge, there are common patterns that can be used to help.  One is the Scrum of Scrums, where one or more representatives from each Scrum team meet daily to coordinate Sprint work and Sprint dependencies.  Another pattern, one that I consider extremely important when scaling, is a Chief Product Owner.  

The Chief Product Owner is a new unofficial (to Scrum) “role” that can greatly help with scaling Scrum.  In Scrum-speak, this role is the Product Owner of the whole product.  The Chief Product Owner is a person who is the single point of accountability for the success or failure of the complete project. This person owns the overall single product-level Backlog,  and provides guidance to the group of product owners on the Scrum teams that comprise the complete effort.  The chief Product Owner uses this backlog to coordinate the work, likely in the form of sub-backlogs, between the sub-teams, through each individual team’s Product Owner.

It is important to note that this role is filled by an individual, not a committee.  Without a designated person ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the effort, there is a high risk of “death by committee”.  By identifying a Chief Product Owner you can avoid this and have one final arbiter to order work and accepting results, as Scrum dictates for individual teams.


The Product Owner role is a key role on individual Scrum Teams.  When scaling Scrum, this role takes on even more importance - the success of the entire product relies on deep understanding of the overall product backlog and careful and coordinated roll out of work to individual Scrum teams.   Like the Product Owner role on an individual Scrum team, the Chief Product Owner is a full time role, one that requires a full time focus and commitment in order to be successful.

Scrum: It’s a full-time job.

“An adequate ScrumMaster can handle two or three teams at a time...A great ScrumMaster can handle one team at a time.”

-Michael James

One of the lessons we learned early in our Scrum roll-out was that the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles required much more involvement than originally thought.  Coming from a Waterfall development environment, where releases were long in duration and milestones spread out, people in the organization were used to having key roles on multiple projects, context switching as needed.   Juggling responsibilities in a Waterfall environment seemed to work well, or at least acceptable.  Our Product Managers, for example, could own several product lines, including associated customer meetings and field interactions, and easily satisfy occasional project touch-points such as requirements definition (at the beginning of the release) and Beta and FCS duties (at the end of the release).  These project touch-points required their full-time involvement periodically, a few times a year, making it relatively easy to context-switch periodically and satisfy the needs of each effort.



With Scrum, however, things turned out a bit different.  Though we “took the training” and “read the literature” which repeatedly said the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner were full time jobs, we weren’t true believers.  Our “muscle memory” way of working had everyone juggling multiple roles and responsibilities, it was the way we were used to working. During the course of our Agile Pilot projects, however, we got convinced pretty quickly that Scrum roles could not be part-time.

Scrum is more intensive than waterfall development.   

With frequent “potentially shippable product increments” created every 2-4 weeks,  there’s essentially a full product release at least once a month if not twice.   During our Agile pilots, our Product Managers, filling the role of Product Owners, soon realized that creating and maintaining a Product Backlog required a significant amount of time.  Every few weeks a new set of fully-defined “product requirements” need to be ready for the team for the next Sprint. Product Owners found it challenging to satisfying their Scrum PO role and concurrently complete other project work.  Our Scrum Masters, too, found themselves booked full-time, facilitating team interactions, producing Sprint Burn Down charts, working impediments, and delivering frequent product releases at regular Sprint Review.  Team members, often with other-project responsibilities, found themselves spending more time delivering on Sprint Goals, often at the expense of their other responsibilities.  

As we scale Scrum within the organization, we’ve (obviously!) needed to identify new Scrum Masters and Product Owners.  We’ve held fast to the one project per Scrum Master recommendation. Identifying new dedicated Scrum Masters has been fairly easy - our Pilot teams was that the efforts produced several Scrum Master candidates, a nice side-benefit!   Finding full-time Product Owners for each team was more challenging.  Because we’re applying Scrum to large multi-team projects, our mapping of Product Manager positions to Product Owners simply didn’t scale.    Our solution was to look to our lead engineers. Most of our new teams have technical Product Owners, usually Software Architects, and they are dedicated full-time to the team.  Product Managers are involved at either a co-Product Owner (in an outward facing role) or at a higher level in the project effort, via a Product Council-type role that involves them as stakeholders.  

I expect our organization to fine tune (via inspect and adapt) these non-Scrum roles as we mature in our Agility.  But regardless of the organizational “noise” around the Scrum Teams, I believe that participation at the Scrum Team-level will continue to require full-time effort from all members in order to be successful.

Why Agile?

We’re at what I perceive to be a major “transition point” in our Agile transformation.  Most of our Agile pilot teams and projects have successfully completed and we are rolling out internal Scrum training throughout the Product Group.  We’re on the cusp of taking a big step forward with Scrum adoption within our 500 person organization.  It’s at transition points like this when I find myself reevaluating our direction: “Why are we doing this? Are we ready for this next big step?”   Our existing processes do, in fact, lead to shipping product and generating revenue, so: “Why Agile?”

Our original goal, defined we began this transformation, still rings true:

The goal is not to release things faster for the sake of it. It is to achieve nimbleness and agility to deliver on the company’s strategy as it moves forward and/or tactically changes.   It is about creating more business opportunities for ourselves rather than being cased into a model that requires our resource commitment for a time window that is longer than what the market we’re competing in requires.

Specifically, the software development group’s reason for moving from Waterfall to Agile is to achieve nimbleness and agility to deliver on the company’s strategy as it moves forward and/or tactically changes.  We want the ability to efficiently deliver strategic products to market in a timely manner.

Today we have challenges delivering on this goal.  As a mature software organizations our development practices have been hardened over many years of delivering software to tens of thousands of customers.   Our processes have been tempered with the successes (and often, the failures) of the past.    Because of this, it’s difficult to change the current way of doing things.  This is an understandable, and completely human, reaction - but it can dangerous over the long-term.  Fortifying the walls, via policies and procedures as well as organizational divisions, has the result of business being less reactive to change, less agile, which ultimately impacts corporate revenue.   New software releases often take longer to get out the door and may not fully meet customer needs.  Entering new markets in a timely manner becomes difficult, allowing younger more nimble companies a market advantage.   It is for these reasons that we’ve embarked on our development process transformation.

As part of our migration from Waterfall to Agile software development, we need to build a new way of working, including a new corporate culture: one that is nimble and responsive to ever changing business conditions. A culture that values responding to change over following a plan.  One that regularly inspects and adapts, and becomes better over time.  Scrum, with its “inspect and adapt” framework,  is one of the catalysts that can greatly assist us in this journey.

Technical Debt

Technical Debt  is one of my favorite work-related phrases because it succinctly and metaphorically sums up the obligation we incur when we cut corners during software development.  The phrase was coined by Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki and, incidentally, a major contributor to Extreme Programming Agile methodology.

The concept of technical debt can be thought of as the accumulation of product risk introduced by any number of poor development practices.  Examples include poorly designed code, loose development practices, and, in Scrum terms, the delivery of “undone work”.   The payment terms on this debt can be onerous.  Usually the cost is time or productivity, sometimes both.  Dealing with this debt during the product release can increase the work required before the product can ship, often delaying the release.  Or, if you decide to postpone payment until after the release, the cost may be customer-discovered defects which can cause unexpected maintenance escalations and a higher ongoing product maintenance burden, ultimately reducing productivity and velocity for future development.

Regardless, like credit card interest or the National Debt, at some point in the future the bill comes due - someone is going to have to pay off the debt.

For new teams adopting Scrum, Technical Debt can occur without the team being fully aware that it is happening.    For example, teams with a loose definition of Done can introduce technical debt.  Stories may be accepted by the Product owner without having code reviews, minimal automated testing, or no code coverage or memory leak verification.  Any of which could leave unexposed defects in a seemingly “done” feature.  Another possible cause of debt can be caused by user stories that not properly decomposed such that Sprint backlogs do not yield a potentially shippable product increment at the end of a Sprint.  In this case, more work, either known or unknown, is created for “later” in the release.

As a Product Owner, you should keep track of your accumulating debt.  If the debt is significant, I recommend putting it in your Product Backlog, to be prioritized appropriately.  One way that I have found to identify and track any technical debt your team is accruing is to plan periodic “releases” to customers.  Product early releases, in the form of early access programs or Technical Previews, can not only provide valuable customer input that can feed into your backlog, but it also keep the Scrum team in the practice of delivering potentially shippable code.  When engineers realize their code is going to be used by actual customers, often “forgotten” undone work can suddenly appear.

Note that not all debt is “bad” - there are often valid reasons for accumulating technical debt.  Perhaps the underlying architecture has some scalability constraints, but getting the product to market, in other words, harvesting “business value” ($, customers), is more important to the business.  The key is for the Product Owner and Team to explicitly know that this debt was incurred, and accept that you may have to pay in the future be willing to accept that obligation.

The Product Owner should be aware at all times of work that is needed to release the software, including the technical debt that is accruing.  With a complete and publicly visible Product Backlog, there should be no surprises. Keep an eye on your debt - make sure you know how much debt interest is accumulating...

Scrum Cadence

It’s unfortunate that the the Scrum product iteration increment is called a Sprint, implying that each increment is delivered by the team in a mad rush, full throttle.  The image I have in my head is a 100 yard dash, everyone running as fast as they can to reach the finish line.  Developing software is more like running a marathon than it is a back-to-back series of 100 yard dashes.  In order to successfully complete a marathon you have to find a one mile pace you are comfortable running at, and keep running at that speed for 26 miles.  Sprinting hard for the first several miles often means you are walking (or even crawling) the last mile, if you even make it that far.

Me, still running at mile 26, in the 1998 Boston Marathon

One of the challenges many new Scrum teams face is developing a sustainable pace, sometimes called cadence, over multiple sprints over the course of a project.    

New to Scrum, teams often struggle to find a sustainable cadence for delivering potentially shippable product increments.  What I’ve observed happens is this:  Early in a new Scrum project the teams is (I hope) excited to adopt a new way of working.  They understand the Scrum principles and the time-boxed Sprint iteration, and more importantly, they feel a strong commitment to succeed on their newly committed Sprint deliverables within the first few Sprints. After all, at the end of the Sprint they will be proudly demonstrating their work to their stakeholders, which usually includes there boss and department head.  However, since everyone is new to this different way of working, it is inevitable that certain work, usually that requiring specialized skills such as QA and documentation writing skills, ends up being delivered late in the game.  Undeterred, the team works extra hours, heroically delivering the Sprint goals.  This extra effort delivers a much needed early success, builds organization confidence, and can kick-start viral adoption.  However, this type heroic effort doesn’t scale - after 2 or 3 Sprints the team starts feeling burned out and may fail to deliver Sprint-committed work.

In an ideal situation, the Team inspects and adapts, and, over the course of several sprints, build a sustainable cadence.  However, many teams will continue to struggle, and can fall back to the “old way of doing things”.

While every team, project and environment is different, here are some points to consider to help get to a sustainable cadence:

• Work, as a full team, on only one story at a time.  Make sure that story is DONE before starting the next story.  In other words, implement stories sequentially.
• Avoid picking stories targeted for one individual due to their specialized skills.  Make sure the whole team is involved in delivering each story.
• Develop an “in it together” feeling among the team.  If you aren’t feeling this, your team isn’t operating as a true TEAM.  
• Commit to less stories to make sure your Sprint backlog really is DONE at the end of a Sprint.
• Become more of a generalist. Scrum certainly favors “jack of all trades” type of developers.  Coming from a Waterfall environment, where there are separate groups for QA and documentation, work can fall to those with that domain specialization.  As a team member, don’t look at work as “that person’s”, view it as a team deliverable. Learn a new skill to help a team member (and thus the Team) out, be it coding, QA or documentation.
• Be honest and innovative during your Sprint Retrospectives.  It’s your chance to change how you work together to deliver software.
• Get additional training or coaching.  Read Scrum blogs and ask questions on Agile forums.  Likely you are not the first team to run into the issues you are experiencing.
• If you are manager reading this, realize that team cadence, a predictable velocity, is key to delivering on corporate objectives.  Work hard to remove team obstacles and allow them to focus and succeed.  This is the true value of a manager in an Agile world.

Developing a sustainable cadence is one of the keys to the success of the Scrum Team and project effort.  Remember, running a marathon full throttle is unsustainable, unless, of course, you are an ultra-elite runner.  I know I’m not one.

Inspect and Adapt

“SCRUM assumes that the systems development process is an unpredictable, complicated process that can only be roughly described as an overall progression.”

-Ken Schwaber, Scrum Development Process, 1995

One of the things that I like about Scrum is that its creators defined it knowing that no development process is perfect.  The Scrum Guide does not tell us how to build software, rather, it openly acknowledges that building software is complicated and unpredictable.  This may seem odd, with Scrum being thought of as a development process (it’s not).  In a recent post to the Yahoo! Scrum Development group, Ken Schwaber stated that “we purposefully constructed Scrum with a lot of holes in which a person or team or organization has to continually figure out the best thing to do.”

So how does a Scrum team “continually figure out” how to do the best thing?   To facilitate iterative and ongoing improvement, Scrum specifies that each Scrum Team hold a Sprint Retrospectives. Further, these retrospectives must happen frequently, occurring immediately following each Sprint Review.  

It is often overlooked when starting out with Scrum, but I believe the Sprint Retrospective is the most important meetings a Scrum team participates in.  While the Sprint Review is a valuable “public” meeting where working product is demonstrated to stakeholders and customers, the Sprint Retrospective is a “private” team meeting, allowing the team to safely discuss what’s working and want could be improved with regards to how they are delivering their work.  In the Sprint Retrospective, anything that relates to how the team operates can be discussed and possibly tuned or improved.  Up for debate could be how the team communicates, technology issues, done-ness criteria, or even choice of tools, as was recently discussed for one of our new Scrum teams in my organization (They reverted back to whiteboard task charts and spreadsheet burndown charts!).

What this ultimately means is that each Scrum team is evaluating, refining, and improving how they work together and build software every 2 to 4 weeks.  Almost continuously improving throughout the life of the project!  Over a 12 month project there can be upwards of 24 opportunities to “do things better” and improve how the software is built and delivered.   Compare that to our our Waterfall-like development model where we generally conduct formal retrospectives twice, once after Beta and once after we release.   In our current model, we, at best, have one predefined opportunity to improve our practices during the release, at Beta when there is usually no more than 3-4 months of (QA and bug fixing time) time remaining before the software is released.  Process improvement is clearly not highly integrated into our Waterfall process.

With frequent inspection and adaptation we can become more efficient at building and delivering high quality software that meets or even exceeds customer expectation.  So my advice is: take full advantage of your Sprint Retrospectives.   As a Scrum team member, it’s your (frequent!) opportunity to make a difference...

kaizen  (kaɪˈzɛn) - n  a philosophy of continuous improvement 

of working practices that underlies total quality management 

and just-in-time business techniques [Dictionary.com]

Cycling and Scrum

Every year I join a group of friends and ride a 100K charity bike ride.  This ride takes about 4 hours and has turned into a fun yearly tradition. This year, as I was battling my way up the hills of Chilmark (the ride covers most of Martha’s Vineyard), it occurred to me that there were a lot of similarities between the cycle ride I was a part of, and a Scrum team.

Some of the similarities I came up with were as follows:

• Once you know the basics, you can ride a bike a long distance, or participate on a Scrum team.  However, having solid training for each makes doing them much easier and more efficient.

• Developing a regular cadence is valued in both Scrum and cycling.  Going to hard and fast early on can quickly burn you out, making it hard to finish the job.

• Buying a Scrum tool doesn’t make you a better Agile organization, just like buying a new carbon-fiber bike doesn’t make you a better, faster rider.

• I’m a long distance runner, and not a great cycler.  However, riding with my friends, many of whom are serious cyclers, makes me a better rider.  As the ride progressed, I rode smoother, tighter and faster.  Working on a Scrum team has a similar effect for team members.  Knowledge readily spreads to the teammates through frequent communication via daily stand-ups and backlog grooming activities, making them stronger, better engineers.

• Due to the fact that the ride occurs mid-Spring, each member of the team arrives with a different level of fitness, depending on how much training we put in on indoor trainers during the long New England winter.   As such those of us less capable rely on help from the stronger riders. With cycling, teamwork is core to the effort.  Riders work together, take turns leading the group, breaking the wind for the rest of the team,  pulling the group, allowing others (slower, tired riders!) to draft behind them.    Similarly, Scrum is focused on teamwork and less about solo achievements.  Sprints (and thus product releases) can only efficiently succeed if the team works together and arrives at the end together.

• There was a strong team commitment to finish the full 100K. During the ride there were several opportunities during the ride to cut it short - to quit early.  Additionally, the event offers 2 shorter rides, of 10 and 30 miles. But we, as a team, committed to completing the 100K ride regardless of the weather or any other adversity that came our way.    Scrum teams develop a similar strong focus and commitment to delivering potentially shippable product increments and overcoming impediments.

My friends and I had great weather and a fun ride.  We reached the 100K mark, the “finish line” together with a team velocity of 17 [mph] story points.  I’m looking forward to next year’s ride.

"Scrum is Like Chess"

One of my favorite Scrum quotes is “Scrum is like chess.”  

Like chess, the “rules” for Scrum are fairly straight forward. But also like chess, Scrum practitioners require continued practice and ongoing learning to be come good.




So why do it?  If it is hard to master, why change our development process?

Ken Schwaber, a co-author of the Scrum Guide, sums it up best:  “Those who play both games and keep practicing may become very good at playing the games. In the case of chess, they may become Grand Masters. In the case of Scrum, they may become outstanding development organizations, cherished by their customers, loved by their users, and feared by their competitors.”

Being loved by users and feared by competitors would mean that we’re delivering highly desired software products which are generating significant sales growth and, ultimately, more corporate value.  This is the state we, as a company, want to achieve, and it is one of the drivers for our transition from Waterfall to Agile.

So what can you do to become better at Scrum?   

Being part of a Scrum team and new to Scrum, you are likely devoted near-full time on learning new ways of working as well as actually delivering potentially shippable product every Sprint.  But this shouldn’t stop you from allocating some time to digging further into the nuances of Agile software development practices, communication and organizational behavior.

There’s a wealth of information, as well as tons of opinions from many of the great Agile industry experts, on two public Internet groups.  The first, and older, is the Yahoo! Group, Scrum Development (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/).  The second, a Google Group called Agile Leaders (http://groups.google.com/group/agile-leaders?pli=1) was recently created and also features some lively discussions, often by the same cross-section of folks on the Scrum Development list.  By just becoming an observer to these lists you can glean many useful tidbits of information on all aspects of Scrum as well as Agile software development. While these are great resources for every Scrum team member, aspiring ScrumMasters and Product Owners should take particular note of these two valuable resources.

There’s also numerous blogs and webinars that can give you insight to different facets of Scrum.  I’d start there before buying too many books (Amazon lists over 300 books for “Scrum” and over 1300 for “Agile”).  There are many formal and informal Agile and Scrum gatherings, such as Agile New England (http://www.agilenewengland.org) that regularly host events and meet ups.  

And finally, as with any discipline, nothing beats practice coupled with an ongoing desire to learn.

Enjoy the journey!

Multi-tasking Mayhem

One of Scrum’s rules pertains to the purpose of each Sprint, which is to deliver increments of potentially shippable functionality that adheres to a working definition of “done.”

Scrum Guide: http://www.scrum.org/scrumguideenglish/

A few weeks ago I was part of a small team creating an Agile training course for our Product Group.  The one-week time-boxed effort was broken into 5 one-day Sprints - we were going to eat our own dogfood and create the course using the Scrum framework.   For our second Sprint, day 2, I volunteered to implement a couple fairly involved stories from our backlog, each requiring me to create a dozen or so slides with associated training notes.  A accomplished multitasker, I dove into the effort, working on both stories concurrently.  Late afternoon I suddenly found myself in the final hour of the Sprint with both stories more than half complete, but neither story Done!  A bit of panic set in as I contemplated my mistake:  if I had worked on the deliverables sequentially, I’d have easily completed at least one Story, come Sprint review time.  As it stood then, I might not have anything done.   I felt momentarily paralyzed by my situation and realized that I’d have to put in extra effort to get the work done in time.  I also realized I had a great topic for my next blog, so all was not lost!

The ability to multitask is often viewed in the workplace as a positive skill:  the ability to juggle and deliver multiple competing priorities in an increasingly complex and dynamic business environment.   However, numerous studies have shown that multitasking only gives the illusion of enhanced productivity, when in actual fact, working on more than one task at the same time often results in less actual productivity!  According to Psychology Today “the mind slows down when it switches back and forth between tasks”.  Each time you switch to a new task you must gain context on the new task while losing some context on the task you left behind.   A Stanford study suggests that when you are switching between multiple tasks, you “couldn't help thinking about the task [you] weren't doing”, leading to a further drop in productivity.

My take-away from this is two-fold:

1. Teams (and individuals) should work on one story/task at a time and deliver on stories sequentially.   The prioritized Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog should is the artifact that focuses the Team.

2. Management should respect the Team commitment (of course!), keep team members 100% dedicated to the Sprint and do whatever necessary to eliminate competing priorities.  When competing work is discovered, the work should be added to the Product Backlog and prioritized by the Product Owner.

Focusing one one story and completing that work before moving on to the next, Scrum teams (as well as individuals) will deliver more work.  Sometimes you have to go “slow” to go fast.

Velocity and Release Planning

“An iterative, story-driven process makes it easy to fix a date but difficult to fix what will be included by a given date.”

-Mike Cohn, User Stories Applied

Predicting a release date is often a big challenge in software development, particularly Waterfall-type development projects.  Actually, making the prediction is the easy part - predicting accurately is the challenge.  

Assuming a team is in place, determining when a software project will be released is a function of time, features, and quality.  Further, by fixing any one of those variables, you can can expect to, perhaps greatly,  impact the other two.   

As my organization transitions from Waterfall to Agile, we’re challenged with how to accurately perform Agile product release planning and reflect that back to the wider (non-development) organization.   With the “old way of doing things” there is a general comfort with holding a written plan, a project schedule, even if everyone knows that plan has a high probability of being wrong.

Waterfall Release Planning

In today’s hyper-competitive business world, a product release date is often defined by company management.  This is true in both Agile and Waterfall development environments.  In my experience, it’s been true for most, if not all, of the large waterfall development project that I have been a part of the past 25 years.

Once a release date has been set and communicated to the field, the development team heroically tries to meet that date.  If you are a lucky engineer, your management team gives you some time to flesh out requirements, create a architecture and design documents, define tasks and a schedule, and ultimately allow your data to influence the release schedule.  Even with that luxury, challenges abound to meet this “defined up front” schedule: as you implement more, you learn more, the work remaining becomes more defined, ultimately impacting the project release date - often it is later than originally predicted, rarely is it earlier.   

When faced with more work remaining than time allowed, a hard delivery date often forces you to cut features to meet the schedule.  The problem is that features may be partially implemented (waste) and often most of the remaining work is quality assurance testing.  In those situations, the choice becomes tougher: slip the schedule or reduce testing (and thus quality).  It turns into a Kobayashi Maru (“no win”, for those who aren’t Star Trek fans) situation.  We’ve all been there, and we all bear the battle scars.

Release planning is different with Scrum

With a Scrum Team producing potentially shippable code with every Sprint iteration, we’ve essentially fixed one of the release planning variables: quality.  In order for a product to be potentially shippable, it must have a level of customer-expected quality.  This leaves the organization two remaining adjustable dials: time and features.  


The amount of completed work (user stories “done”) a Scrum team can deliver in a given iteration is identified as the team’s Velocity.  Velocity is a key metric for release planning - it quantifies the capacity of the team for a Sprint.  Knowing a team’s velocity, coupled with a sized Product Backlog, the Product Owner can get an approximate idea of what features will be delivered by a specific time.   [You can reference numerous books and blogs for further details about story sizing and velocity, with Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied, and  Agile Estimating and Planning being two of the more highly regarded references.]

Time-based Release Planning

If you’re organization is going to mandate a release date, you must readily accept that you won’t initially know the full feature set that will be delivered on that date.  But, by using the Scrum Team’s velocity, you can get an approximate idea of the feature set.  

Knowing a team’s velocity, how much work a team can get “done” in a Sprint, will help predict how much of product backlog can be implemented by the time the mandated product release date arrives.   By using the team’s velocity, the number of sprints that can be completed before the release date can be computed (remember, Sprints are of fixed time).  Applying that to the backlog can give you a very good idea of what features will make the release and what are on the “bubble”.  Usually this is better than good enough.   Features that are on the delivery bubble, those that may or may not make the release, are much lower in priority than those that will be fully “done” prior to the release date.  These backlog items shouldn’t be make or break features, and can be saved for a subsequent release.

When the surrounding corporate environment is not Agile and you need to publish a future product feature list to a wider audience, the majority of the the features on the Backlog that comfortably fit into the velocity capacity can be communicated outward, setting expectations and enabling the coordination of public release-type activities such as PR, marketing, etc.

Feature-based Release Planning

If you product must complete a specific set of features before you can release, then using team Velocity can help you predict your release date.  By using the team’s velocity, and mapping it to the product backlog, you can predict many sprints it will take to complete the required backlog items.   Release burndown charts are great at visualizing how much work is remaining in a release and identifying how many sprints are likely required before you can ship the product.

Because the team velocity can vary from sprint to sprint a firmed up average, team velocity usually isn’t firmed up until the team achieves a regular Sprint cadence - usually 3 or so sprints.  To determine a release date early on, you will need to consider velocity variability.  Mapping out a release date window can be computed by using the predicted best velocity and predicted worse velocity, which will give you a release window as your target release date.  As more sprints are delivered, this release window can be refined.  

Product Backlog Considerations

The Product Backlog is a living entity.  As you learn more about your customer needs, and hopefully get customer feedback on early sprints, you likely will add and remove items as well as re-prioritize items, all of which can effect your release date.  Additionally, the team velocity likely will fluctuate - but with short (2-4 week) sprints, you will have your finger on the pulse, having up-to-date velocity measures as well as average and historical values.  Using this data, you can frequently map out how many sprints will be required to deliver true product value to the market.


Continuous Planning

Release planning within Scrum doesn’t happen just once, at the beginning of the release, as it does with waterfall development.  The release plan is evaluated and possibly adjusted at the end of every iteration, as more is known and team velocity is refined.  Realize that it may not be the project release date that is adjusted, rather it could be the work that will be delivered.  As more potentially shippable product increments are delivered by the team, the organization has  the opportunity to gather customer feedback, and use that feedback to influence (to add or remove items from) the product backlog.  Doing so may change your release date, or the features ultimately delivered.  Further, performing this activity regularly, doing frequent customer validation and backlog/release grooming, gives the organization the opportunity to deliver a product that better matches market needs.

For my organization, Scrum has given us a higher level of confidence with our release planning.  This year we’re part of a new corporate initiative requires that requires product by the end of 2011.  After the recent success of our Scrum pilots, we have a new found confidence in our planning such that we believe we’ll be able to deliver working shippable product by that deadline by using Scrum.  We can’t currently say what the complete functionality set will be with absolute certainty, however, but that’s okay.  We know we’ll deliver shippable product by the end of the year.