#18 Breaking Down The Uber Release

Symptom: The team are working through the priorities but across many areas with no defined production releases other than the single uber release.

Probable Cause: This can be down to not having a release plan to break up the product backlog into cohesive releases.

Suggested Resolution: Try to create a series of releases in a release plan that looks to group common product backlog stories together to form production deliverables or common objectives.

A good way to do this is to define the end objective and get in touch with the product concept for the project, and then work backwards to define good, and sometimes strategic, releases that will enable a team to achieve the end deliverable.

These defined releases can then be used to partition up the product backlog stories into areas of focus for the team.

What you are looking for is a segmented product backlog by release that may have a collection of sprints each with a collection of prioritised user stories. This higher level partitioning of the backlog should help the team to focus on the current release whilst being aware of future releases and also help them to prioritise effectively within the objective of the current release.

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