Who conducts the Release Readiness Meeting
Hello,
I am a developer and fairly new to SCRUM. I have recently been assigned the task of conducting a release readiness meeting. My question is, is it not the Product Owner's role to do this?
Any insight will help.
Thanks,
Hiro
Hiro,
There is no assigning in Scrum. Assigning work is a symptom of traditional command and control practices that have no place in Scrum.
The Product Owner is responsible for selecting release points for completed stories, in order to maximize business value. I do not believe the Scrum Guide dictates responsibility for release-related activities.
That said, a few questions:
- Who is the one doing the assigning?
- What does your Definition of Done include? Are releases still managed outside of the sprint?
- What criteria make up your organization's Release Readiness? Can any of these criteria be performed for stories within the sprint they are developed in? If not, why?
What do you hope to accomplish by having a "release readiness" meeting? What information would it provide about "release readiness" that you don't already know?
In Scrum, the Sprint Backlog is the forecast of work needed to deliver a potentially releasable increment which satisfies the Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done. The work must be fully integrated and fit for release at the Product Owner's discretion by the end of the Sprint, even where multiple teams are involved.
Why then do you need a special meeting for release readiness? The Sprint Backlog should be updated and replanned in the Daily Scrum, or more often if necessary. At any point in a Sprint it should be possible for the remaining work to be summed using predictive measures such as task burndown charts. Do you have that transparency in place?