What occurs during a release planning session and why is it valuable?

Avoid adding release planning agenda items that do not fall within the typical scope of the meeting. For example, most teams would not expect to have a discussion about estimation for a future project or software performance during a release planning session.

Before the release planning session begins, I check in with the Product Owner to ensure the product backlog is prioritized and updated with any relevant information. I ensure the burndown chart is current and that we have a solid velocity projection to use for the meeting.

During the meeting, we discuss the priorities for the next few sprints and how we can best order the stories to maximize our time and efforts as a team. The Product Owner offers insight into when the client needs certain features, and we use the velocity and needed scope to determine the schedule of major releases.

The meeting is very valuable to the teams I work with and the customers we support. It helps us understand how well we execute each release, allows us to set customer expectations, gives us specific goals to work towards, and provides the data I need as a Scrum Master to understand the impact of new requests, opportunities, or issues that arise during the execution of the plan. We revisit the release plan regularly to make sure we are all on the same page and fully understand the impact of the strategic and tactical decisions we make.