Release planning – when will you set your features free?

So now we have a product backlog. What next? Well, if you're not required to forecast a set of functionality for a future point in time, then the team should simply start working by pulling items from the top of the backlog to implement. When an organization requires a team to forecast a set of scope for a set period of time, they will, however need to do release planning.

Timing of releases and release planning

Releases themselves should occur at a point in time designated by the product owner when he has evaluated the return on investment and determined that a set of features should be made available to customers or users. The product owner, likely, will have an idea of release timeframes before any work has begun (I needed it yesterday!). There is a frequency at which customers or users would like to see new features, and it is the product owner's responsibility to determine this cadence. For example, in the map application on my...