Agile Project Planning

People often think that Agile is all about shooting from the hip and that planning is shunned. In actual fact, even though Agile rejects the Waterfall approach of defining system requirements for months and years before development even begins, a successful project will always be well planned and have a clear path forward.

Warning: There are lots of ways to plan for a successful project. Below are some of the practices and tools that I use for planning that have worked well within my company and with most of my clients. Don't take this is the one true way, because there is no such thing in software development :)

Since I started this blog I’ve had posts that have covered a number of topics regarding Agile project planning. Now I’m tying them all together into one cohesive post. Each of these posts reference a spreadsheet tool that I use for planning my projects. Here is a link to my Project Planning Spreadsheet.

1. User Stories – Your high-level application requirements. Link to a sample story backlog.
2. Product Roadmap – A high level view of the delivery plan. Link to a sample product roadmap.
3. User Story Estimates – Estimates for each user story. Link to a sample user story estimates spreadsheet.
4. Project Timeline Planning – Using story estimates and product roadmap to create a delivery plan. Link to a sample timeline planning spreadsheet.
5. Project Resource Planning – Planning headcount and resource costs. Link to sample resource planning spreadsheet.
6. Project Budget Planning – Adding team resource costs plus hardware costs, services costs, and external resource costs. Link to a sample budget plan.

A solid project plan will also include the business case and address the risk management, security, architecture, infrastructure, and implementation. These are more general topics that will be addressed in their own due time!