Understanding product planning in an empirical environment;
Could someone please elaborate on this.
Its part of what a Scrum Master should do towards the Product Owner.
Empirical environment? Is this another way of saying that product planning should be done by being able to assign the "correct" number of story points based on similar features and know the Velocity based on the past?
No.
An empirical environment is one where improvement and direction is guided by experiments and experience.
So, how could product planning work in an empirical environment? How could the Scrum Master help?
Experience is based on the past, right? So the Scrum master use experience to experiment with the planning. But how? Guiding the team to do planning with knowledge on how earlier plans was carried out. Do anyone have any real cases that they can tell about?
Jan,
Recall the context where the thread title came from. Who is responsible for product planning? The Scrum Master? The Product Owner? The Development Team?
In your mind, how can an empirical process (i.e. - learning) be used to support product planning? Consider how products are planned for in Scrum to help your understanding.
Jan, forecasts can be made based on what has been learned from the past and what is known about the present. Many aspects affect empirical planning including factors such as past performance and capacity differences this iteration. Only the known can be used to create a plan which forecasts the delivery.
The amount of uncertainty in a forecast increases as you look further into the future. What is know about a month from now? A quarter from now? A year from now? There is a lot that could change.
Understanding product planning in an empirical environment - this comes as one of the ways Scrum Master can serve Product Owner. So per my understanding Product Owner prepares the Plan ( say for a Sprint release) and Scrum Master provides him necessary inputs, based on his experiences and learnings, to make the Plan as much foolproof as possible. Scrum Master can only provide inputs however he cannot insist that Product Owner should incorporate his suggestion in the Plan. Can someone please confirm if my understanding is correct...
It is the Product Owner's job to perform product planning, since it is his job to maximize the value of the product and part of this is product planning. The Scrum Master's service to him or her is making sure that he or she knows the best way to do this.
Could we add that Empirical planning as opposed to planning of waterfall method whereby all is planned before work begins would be the one where Product Owner and SCRUM Team needs to learn to have a clear vision in term of tasks and estimation of upcoming stories and a rough one not prioritized stories to be refined along experience of past sprints ?
Thank you for your feelings about that.