Module 1.2: Plan the release

Release planning ensures that the teams share a common vision of the project by aligning the design with requirements, development, and test plans.

By creating high-level plans for the entire project, teams can better predict resource usage and improve their ability to meet established delivery dates.

The product backlog lists all the stories to implement and the team decides which ones to address during the release. The challenge is to identify the correct set of features to develop first, because mistaken priorities can lead to commitments that the team cannot deliver. Business value is an important factor to prioritize in the product backlog, but other aspects must also be considered, such as risks and dependencies.

Agile development teams want to address risk early in the process to remove uncertainties as soon as possible. When a story contains technical challenges, a safe approach is to increase its priority. However practitioners know that dependencies might exist between stories. Sometimes, a high-priority story can be implemented only after the work of a related story is complete.

During release planning, Al the architect needs to ensure that the candidate architecture aligns with the business needs, and that dependencies between features are accounted for. Al also wants to assign high-risk items, particularly architecturally significant requirements, to early iterations.

Help topic icon Integrating design management with requirements management

Help topic icon Integrating design management with Rational Team Concert

[CLM scenario] Design management integrates with requirements management (RM) and change and configuration management (CCM) capabilities to facilitate the planning, tracking, and aligning of design resources with requirements.

Help topic icon Overview of the CLM solution


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