How do you plan and estimate in Scrum?

Often, the marketing group or the customer will set the release date. With a release date set, the development and marketing groups must work together to provide the features with the highest value for the product’s first release. Marketing should prioritize the features, while the product development group provides estimates for the effort. Marketing and product development must agree on the target set of features. If the product development group cannot deliver the requested features, the groups must negotiate a reduced set of features.

In negotiating features in the release, management must identify available developers for feature development. The number of developers for each team must meet the Scrum recommendation: no more than 10. Of course, you can have several teams. To complete negotiations with the marketing department, the product development group must have the required developers committed to the project for the identified time period.

Once negotiations between the marketing and product development groups are complete, the backlog is allocated to sprints in priority order. The product development group also establishes the target development environment and determines the risks associated with it. While the marketing department understands what the customer needs and the value to the customer, product development members understand the risk of new technologies, tools, or software processes. They identify and address these risks in the decision-making that leads to the feature allocation to sprints. In general, they address risky items in early sprints to allow time to recover if technical difficulties arise.

Planning proceeds relatively quickly because the initial assumptions will surely change as sprints deliver incremental functionality.