Pro .NET 2.0 Extreme Programming

Release planning has two phases: an exploration phase and a planning game phase. During the exploration phase, analysis is conducted and requirements are gathered in the form of user stories. As each user story is created, developers are asking if the user story is estimatable and testers are asking if the user story is testable. The user stories are also estimated in the exploration phase. If the user story is too big, it is split. If the user story is not estimatable, because the developers don’t know how to estimate it, the user story is spiked. During the planning game phase, the customer prioritizes the user stories from 1 to n. The tracker will declare the number of story points that can be completed in the release. The customer will select user stories that do not exceed the number of story points declared by the tracker. If the user stories selected have enough business features to be valuable, then the project continues.