Can anyone shed some light on best practices of when / where/ how to establish the scope of the Release in the Agile Development Lifecycle model? Our problem seems to be that we can never get to the point when we can nail down what the scope of the release is. When we do, it seems to be last minute and I am sure that this is not the best method for testing..

Lewis,

Irrespective of development methodology, the release scope should be known before the development starts, granted it can change along the way as requirements, issues and defects, and changes are added and removed. If you are saying we know this release is going to be these 5 changes, and towards the end it become 15 changes. This is indicates bad process.

Even though Agile is concerned as much about process as people, it still requires that you follow some semblance of a release plan. Remember that Agile doesn't mean cowboy developing and releasing.

Regards,

Joe

Im in agreement with Joe. Even in an agile environment where you might break down a development/testing process into pieces or iterations/sprints you still need to have an understanding of what needs to be released. In fact knowing what has to be released is a pre-requisite for dividing up the work into smaller pieces.

We prefer to define the content in a release up front so we can communicate this to our clients who are eager to know what changes are coming. This doesnt normally lend itself well to releasing items adhoc but its still possible if a good feature branching approach is used.

A few websites & webpages you may want to checkout are below. Note that in pretty much all cases, there is always a initial release-plan. It may start-off high-level and get further elaborated and time goes by, but there should always be an initial vision & scope.

• Agile 101 - Customer and Mgmt Practices -- Release Planning
• ExtremaPlanner: Agile Release Planning - A How-To Guide
• Dean Leffingwell on Agile Release Planning
• James Shore presentation (video) : Agile Release Planning from Top-to-Bottom
• Simon Baker on Agile Release Planning
• Mike Cohn on Agile Release Planning
• MS-Word: Agile Planning with a Multi-customer, Multi-project, Multi-discipline Team, by Karl Scotland
• Also consider a search of InfoQ.com content on "Agile Release Planning"