In this step, the Product Owner and development team will try to plan project releases.

Who

Product Owner Scrum Master

Planning in SCRUM

SCRUM is based on development in timeboxes called Sprint. Sprint is the time needed to complete selected stories (features, bugs, requirements, tasks,…). The length of the sprint is typically 30 days, but it depends on a development strategy and product owner requirements.

Every sprint usually ends with a demo of the work completed. At the end of the sprint, the development team shows all completed stories to the product owner, stakeholders, management, and anyone who is interested. These stories are also typically shipped to the product owner.

Customers get a product version shipped in one or more releases. Release contains completed work of one or more sprints.

In SCRUM are all the sprint stories released typically in one release. ScrumDesk enables the development of more releases in one sprint. To support this advantage feature, ScrumDesk supports the Planning matrix.

The planning matrix is a matrix of the releases and sprints. Every cell is a storyboard filled with stories that will be shipped in a given release and developed in the time of the sprint.

ScrumDesk: Release plan

The product owner needs to know the details of the release plan. The release plan is a plan of dates when the completed product version will be shipped to customers.

As an example, we are going to release RSS Reader in two releases, one called Release A (alpha) and the second release called Final release.

Release planning in ScrumDesk is supported in view Planning. After the start, the top row is displaying Product Backlog stories that are unassigned to any sprint (we don’t have stories yet, so it’s empty).

The bottom row displays the sprint selected in the combo box.

New Release

No release is created by default. To create a new release, log in as Product Owner. Only the product owners (and Scrum Master in case of problems) can create a new release.

Click on the New link on the right upper corner in the Backlog row.

Release dialog will appear. Enter release name, description, and estimated date of the release. At the bottom of the dialog will be automatically calculated statistics for this release.

Close the Release dialog and look at the timeline. A small black rectangle will appear indicating the newly created release. Clicking on this rectangle marker, Release dialog details will be displayed.

Now let’s create the second, and the final, release of the RSS Reader sample.

In the release combo box, you can see all defined releases and extra items to easily filter stories unassigned to some of the releases or all the stories.