Release Plan Evaluation

The goal of a release planning document is to provide a team with a strong understanding of its goals for the coming release, and the user stories associated with those goals. These goals must be prioritized, and have relative time estimates (in story points). Evaluation of the release plan is aimed at determining how well the team has done at the descriptive, estimating, and prioritizing tasks.

The grade for the release planning document (100 points possible) will be based on the following criteria:

• (5 points) Document heading section present and complete.
• (25 points) High level goals are present, and listed in priority order. The set of high level goals seems feasible for the amount of time remaining for this release. Points will only be docked for wildly unrealistic estimates; good faith estimates that turn out to be wrong will not be penalized.
• (25 points) User stories are present, and is given in the correct format ("As a {user role}, I want {goal} [so that {reason}]"). Each user story is associated with a high level goal, and each high level goal can be traced to a user story. Note that no traceability matrix is required (a table that maps high level goals to user stories), but the document should note any mappings of high level goals to user stories that are not obvious from reading the text of the goal or story.
• (15 points) User stories should be listed in priority order, and grouped into 2 Sprints, with user stories prioritized within each Sprint.
• (20 points) Each user story has an associated implementation time estimate, given in story points.
• (10 points) The product backlog section is present, and contains high-level goals and user stories that did not make it into this release. If this section is empty, an explanation for why should be present.