Nowadays, it is common for engineering and product teams to work remotely, which makes it essential to set up virtual environments for meetings. This is especially important for the Release Planning Meeting, a key product and project management activity.
To help you get started, this blog post will show you how to set up a virtual environment for your release planning meeting using a Miro board. Before you begin, it’s important to make sure you have the following prerequisites:
A product backlog that is at least partially groomed. You can use tools like the Product Vision Canvas and User Story Mapping to help you prepare it.
A prioritized product backlog. This will help you focus on the most important items and ensure that your team is making progress on the most valuable work.
With these prerequisites in place, you’ll be ready to set up your virtual environment and get started with your release planning meeting.
So, let’s get started.
Product Backlog
To begin, you can start by writing all of your user story titles on the Miro board. Be sure to number each story according to its priority, and consider grouping related stories by epic. This will help you organize your information and make it easier for your team to review and discuss during the release planning meeting.
During the meeting, the Product Owner will use it to make the storytelling and review the priority with the teams.
Relative estimation graph
The estimation phase can start when the storytelling is finished and the team clearly knows the release goals.
The image shown above illustrates a useful tool for team-based estimation. During the release planning meeting, each developer should take turns selecting a story from the backlog and adding it to the graph. This process will allow the team to collectively estimate each story's relative size and complexity, which can help plan and prioritize the work.
When all the stories are placed, ask, in turn, every developer if wants to modify something and let the team discuss the modification.
T-Shirt Size
It’s time to create clusters and assign them a size using the t-shirt size estimation technique
It should be useful to map t-shirt sizes with story points. These could help the team during the next step: Sprint Mapping
Sprint Mapping
When planning a release, you can either fix the scope or fix the time. In the former, you need to determine how many sprints the team will require to develop all of the features in the release. In the latter, you need to identify which features the team can release within the fixed time period.
In either scenario, the velocity metric can assist. As a measure of how many story points a team can complete within a single sprint, velocity can help to determine the number of sprints needed to complete a release. For example, if a release requires 60 story points and the team has a velocity of 20, it can be inferred that the team will require 3 sprints to work through the backlog items identified for the release.
During this phase, the team adds the prioritized features to the sprint backlog until the total story points match the team’s velocity. Once this capacity is reached, the team will move on to the next sprint and continue with the remaining items in the release backlog.
This phase can help to identify cross-team or external dependencies that could also modify the sequence of work. In the image above the dependencies are the green sticky notes.
Risk Board
The participants should identify risks for the overall project and the already-known requirements. Then, they should evaluate the risks and define some mitigation actions.
Finalize
The release plan is complete. Ensure that it is accessible to all team members and let’s proceed with implementation.
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