Agile Release Management: Unlocking Value For Scrum & Kanban

Maximize your learning by using adjustable playback speed up to 2x or 0.5x, professional subtitles with CC, and transcripts, and provide ratings and feedback to help improve the course.

Develop a compelling product vision that sets a clear destination for the next two to five years, rallying the team and guiding early evangelists toward product market fit.

Create a flexible agile product roadmap that centers on outcomes with defined goals and key results, not feature specific, using now, next, someday to plan releases.

Evaluate your current state by combining quantitative metrics: release frequency, deployment duration, on-time delivery, defect escape, rollbacks, downtime, and value delivery, with qualitative interviews of key release management roles.

Identify your release’s target users by building data-driven user personas that blend assumptions, surveys, and interviews to inform ideation and align your teams, including marketing and design, around the product.

Create a user persona prototype by outlining assumptions, gathering data from interviews and analytics, and building a Canva or Extensible persona with traits, goals, frustrations, and channels.

The scrum guide 2020 defines a usable increment by sprint end, meeting the definition of done. The team decides when to release and may deploy continuously, even mid-sprint.

Compare velocity based and capacity based (commitment based) planning in agile sprints, detailing how to set sprint goals, select backlog items, estimate tasks, and check velocity against prior work.

Compute the team's velocity from three sprints by averaging story points delivered, adjusting for availability and commitment. Use velocity to inform release planning toward the product vision.

Define your release strategy by balancing risk, regulatory demands, stakeholder needs, and delivery infrastructure. Automate deployments, use feature toggles, and align with architecture to support frequent releases or infrequent cadences.

Explore release planning fundamentals, then manage risk with MVPs and NCVHS, and practice fixed scope and fixed date release plans.

Explore how agile estimates measure effort for a work item, considering scope, complexity, and uncertainties, while clarifying that estimates are not targets or commitments and should separate estimation from planning.

Identify the iron triangle of planning, where date, budget, and scope constrain release outcomes. In agile release planning, fix schedule and resources in sprints, vary scope for MVPs.

Define your MVP by selecting a rider persona, outlining measurable outcomes and risky assumptions, and separating needs from wants to form a minimal viable feature set.

Identify external constraints and feature estimates to prepare release plans for scrum or kanban just in time. Visualize with a backlog line to define fixed date or fixed scope releases.

Develop a fixed date release plan by determining the number of sprints, estimating velocity as a range from historical data, and selecting must haves and might haves from the backlog.

Create a fixed scope release plan by totaling MVP backlog items into story points, estimating velocity as a range, and deriving optimistic and pessimistic sprint dates for stakeholders.

Discover the three key ingredients for great releases: modular architecture, strong team relationships, and automation. Implement API contracts, a bill of materials, and automated deployments to reduce risk.

Explore how the deployment pipeline delivers code from commit to production with push-button releases, enabling agile release management with build, test, and deployment automation for visibility, control, and traceability.

Understand how continuous integration merges changes into the main branch with builds and tests, how continuous delivery automates deployment to testing, and how continuous deployment pushes updates to production automatically.

Explore the testing stack from unit to exploratory testing and how automation shapes the pyramid for faster end-to-end validation, with a focus on release-aligned test strategy.

Use dark launches to release production-ready features to a small user group via feature flags, enabling controlled rollout, feedback, and safe rollback without affecting all users.

Assess readiness to scale agile and compare three scaling frameworks: safe, less, and Nexus. Get a high level overview with pros and cons and guidance on when to use each.

Explore the scaled agile framework, its value streams and the agile release train. Learn how program increments enable regular value delivery, cadence, and release on demand.

LeSS scales scrum for multiple teams on a single product, delivering value while reducing complexity. Begin with basic LeSS for 2–8 teams, using one product backlog and one product owner.