Planning Sprints and Releases

This week’s SoundNotes features a question submitted by a student during a recent Certified Scrum Master class. The question was posted in the topic parking lot and we did not have time to address it during class, so I followed up with the student after class and we discussed it via phone. I also offered to do a podcast on it and Jeff Howey joins me this week to dig into the topic. Because I spoke to the student after class, I was able to add some more detail for Jeff which you will hear during the conversation, but the question posted by the student was: I would like to know how long should milestones typically be and how many sprints should we break it down to? We have a goal of what we want to achieve and a rough timeline but we don’t log too many feature tickets ahead of time thinking that the task might become stale or pollute the board with an everlasting list of things to do and most of the time we were just closing the tickets. As a result, I feel we become short-sighted and optimize for the current sprint but not for the milestone.