Olga Blinova

Release Planning as long-term vision in Scrum 

Nowadays many development teams take advantage of agile methodologies to manage the  development of their products. Scrum which is one of the frameworks of the agile philosophy is very different from the traditional water-fall method. It is a very lightweight process that encourage changes and collaborative work of the team. 

Despite the flexible nature of scrum and its ability to produce working software subsets in short periods of time, long-term planning such as release planning is also very important and beneficial for the agile teams. Long-term planning helps scrum teams to gain a shared vision and keep a “big picture” of the product. It allows an early prediction of risks and dependencies, simplifies tracking and communication of the progress to all stakeholders.

However agile teams can profit from release-planning only if it is properly adapted to the agile process. 

This thesis aims to investigate and evaluate the agile long-term planning process and implement some prototypical functionalities of release planning and tracking as an additional module for the agile project management tool “scrummage”, which has been developed at the University of Paderborn.