Practice: Release Planning
The Release Planning practice embodies the concept of high-level planning for the complete project scope (macro-) and low-level (micro-) planning for the immediate and next increments or iterations.
Why adopt this practice

Why adopt this practice?

Release Planning improves the accuracy of project planning, the ability to predict resource usage, and the ability to meet established delivery dates. In adopting this practice, the project team can better manage scarce resources and focus on delivering scope with higher quality and value to the organization.

In some development approaches, project managers would plan the whole project at project initiation, and then execute the plan, with little or no modifications to the original project plan unless there were significant scope changes or risks that derailed the project. These approaches depend a lot on the project managers' personal knowledge of the scope, and the resources available to deliver the scope. In many cases, these plans would become inaccurate and useless after the first one or two phases. At that point, many project managers would simply manage the milestones and abandon the detailed tasks.

Even seasoned project managers can benefit from Release Planning. As more and more software developers move to iterative methods for delivering software, the need to perform just-in-time project planning is critical. Planning for the next few weeks is always more accurate than planning for the next few months. The goal of this practice is to balance the high-level and low-level planning such that detailed (low-level) planning occurs just-in-time to support the successful delivery of the software products.
 

Application

The best way to read this practice is first to get familiar with its overall structure: what it is in it and how it is organized. 

Start with the available work products:

Also, check the work product templates and reports. See:

Finally, get more details on how to perform project planning and staff a project by looking at:

See more information on How to Adopt the Release Planning Practice.

Additional Information

Additional Resources

For more information on the Release Planning approach, see the following:

  • Kroll, P. and Kruchten, P. The Rational Unified Process Made Easy, Addison Wesley, 2003. Chapter 12: Planning an Iterative Project.