Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning

1. 3 Key Points

   • Trial and demonstration uncover the true requirements, which then require re-planning.
     • Use of prototypes in the initial planning to allow the stakeholders o adjust the project based on the experienced
   • Agile planning is less of and up-front effort and is instead done throughout the project
     • Distribute the planning throughout the project life cycle to help better adjust to any emerging information
   • Mid-core adjustment are the norm
     • Agile is suited for a quickly changing enviroment

2. 9 Principals of Agile Planning

   • Plan at multiple levels
   • Engage the team and the customer in planning
   • Manage expectations by frequently demonstrating progress and extrapolating velocity
   • Tailor processes to the project's characteristics
   • Update the plan based on the project's priorities
   • Ensure emcompassing estimates that account for risk, distractions, and team availability
   • Use appropriate estimate ranges to reflect the level of uncertainty in the estimates
   • Factor in diversions and outside work

3. Agile Discovery

   • Emergent plans and design vs predictive plans and design
   • Pre-planning activities to consensus o the best approach
   • Backlog Refinement
   • Estimating uncertain work vs certain work
   • The characteristic of new product development versus well understood and repeatable projects

4. Progressive Elaboration

   • Add new details and new information arises. Theses assets might include: plans, estimates, risk assessments, acceptance criteria, etc.

5. Estimating Range

   • Key points to estimate range
     • Estimates are done for scheduling the project
     • Agile teams estimate until the last moment in where the work is done
     • Team members doing the work are responsible for estimating their work

6. Tools for Sizing and Estimating

   • Sizing, Estimating and Planning
     • Backlog refining
       • Continually updating, reorganizing and accurately reprioritize the backlog
       • Adding new stories
       • Remove stories
       • Reprioritize or resize existing stories
     • Relative Sizing
       • Making comparative estimates is more efficient and accurately
       • Units used are usually story points
     • Story Point
       • Removes the estimation approach of work per hour and makes it about complexity
       • Usually based on the Fibonnacci sequence
       • Each team defines their own story points
       • Point sizes are relative
       • Include complexity, work effort and risk in the estimate
       • All inclusive
       • Tolerant to imprecision in estimates
       • Works for smaller US and epics
     • Affinity Estimating
       • Groups items into similar categories
       • Tries make sure US remain consistent
       • Creates columns in which we place the stories with the same points
     • T-shirt sizing
       • Coarse-grained estimating
       • Roughly estimate the size of a story
       • Goes from Extra Small to XXL
       • Can help us compare complexity of one task to another in the same category
     • Story Maps
       • High-level planning
       • Used by stakeholders
       • Shows when features will be delivered and what the release will include
       • Arrange stories by priorities downwards, descending order of importance
       • Arrange horizontally on usage sequence
     • Product Roadmap
       • Visual depiction of the product releases and main components of the release
       • Provides stakeholders with a view of each release and deliveries
     • Wideband Delphi
       • Group-based submit estimates anonymously
       • Anonymity produces improves estimates
       • Prevents
         • Bandwagon effect
         • HIPPO decision making
         • Groupthink
       • Iterative
       • Adaptive
       • Collaborative
     • Planning Poker
       • Provides faster and more efficient way of estimating story points
   • Decomposing requirements
     • The work is broken into chuncks from Features, which is the decomposed to chunks of User Stories, and then to Tasks
   • User Stories
     • Create candidate profiles to help identify the users and the benefits to the user
       • 3 C's
         • Card
           • Simply a token that represents a requirement
         • Conversation
           • A verbal exchange of idea and information between the customer and the development team
         • Confirmation
           • Confirmation from the customer that the story has been implemented
       • INVEST
         • Independent
           • Ideally we want to b able to re-prioritize and develop our stories in any order
         • Negociable
           • Discuss stories with the product owner and make trade off based on cost and functions
         • Valuable
           • State the benefit or value of the requirement
         • Estimatable
           • Estimate the effort of a user story
         • Small
           • Small user stories are easier to estimate
         • Testable
           • Have testable user stories
     • Backlog
       • All user stories are written in this single list.
       • Includes all functional and non-functional work
       • Sorted by priority
       • Helps guide the team's priorities
       • Helps to manage releases and iterations

7. Release and Iteration Planning

   • Types of Iteration
     • Most common is to build increments of the product
     • Preparatory iterations
     • Iteration different to build a product
     • Iteration H
     • Hardening sprint
     • Release sprint
   • Spikes
     • Use to head off problems and resolve them ASAP
     • Explores approach, investigates issue and reduces project risk
     • Architectural Spike
       • Proof of concept
       • Can it be done?
     • Risk-Based Spike
       • To reduce issues or threats to the project
     • Fast Failure
       • If there is a failure use the remaining funds and to direct to other resources
   • High-Level Planning
     • Requires
       • Updated and prioritized backlog
       • Relative estimates for each US
       • Target date for release
       • Release goal
   • Release Planning
     • Held before we start a new release
     • Meeting
       • Asses backlog
       • Refine initial outline
       • Sort stories by release
     • Determines which stories will be done next
     • Shared understanding of release goal
     • List of stories to be done
       • Planned around delivering useful and valuable functionality to the customer
       • How much can get done?
         • Velocity tracking
           • Optimistic
           • Pessimistic
           • Average
       • Slicing the stories
         • Breaking down stories that are too large to complete in one iteration
         • Slice stories that include multiple goals
         • Slicing stories that have the same goal but can not be completed in one iteration
   • Iteration Planning
     • Primarily for delivery team
     • The customer has the final say on the priorities
     • Development team has final say on amount of cork that can be done
     • Discuss the backlog
     • Select US for the iteration
     • Define acceptance criteria for the US
     • Break the US down into tasks
     • Estimate tasks
   • Daily Stand-Ups
     • What worked was done since the last meeting?
     • Where there any blocker?
     • What do you plan to finish today?