What's Next?

Thanks for reading this book on the Agile Planning process. We hope that you learned all the techniques in the first section and enjoyed the playful banter of Kelly and Pete working through these techniques in the example section.

Are They Ready to Code?

As we ended the last chapter, Pete finally got his wish of starting development, but this may not always be the next step. For a small two person team, as in the previous example, they may work quickly together without a lot of further planning. On the other hand, on larger software development teams, a significant increase in process is required to keep things running smoothly.

If Kelly and Pete were part of such a team, they might break down their backlog into releases and sprints engaging in the process of sprint planning to help estimate the size of the time investment needed for the project. They would also likely estimate the size of their stories using a relative metric known as story points. All of this is rather advanced for this stage of the game, and gets into the weeds of Agile Workflow Management. Once you master the basics of Agile Planning, diving into these topics will be worth your while, as they are very much required knowledge for working on larger teams.

In Conclusion

Agile planning, when executed with rigor and discipline can flush out assumptions, speed up product planning, and create a great communication medium for your development team and project.

But planning is just the beginning, we can take the desire to have quick feedback loops right down into the individual lines of code. Now that you are steeped in the knowledge of Agile Planning, it's time that you plan your own projects, write acceptance criteria, and always continuously deliver, working valuable software.

Good luck!