Planning

In PPP the chapter on planning is dedicated to XP’s planning game. This is one of the more rigorous and exhaustively described planning processes an Agile team can undertake. Here’s the instructions:

Game Set-up:

a. Identify all the significant user stories… _{not ALL user stories, new ones will continue to be written}

b. Developers estimate those stories based on velocity… Which is a factor by which they should multiply their subjective estimations to get an actual, slightly more objective estimation. velocity is a measure of the average speed it takes the development team to complete stories.

c. Split stories that describe more than one specific feature for the User. Ex. ‘As a user when I go to the app I should be able to adjust all my profile settings.’ vs. ‘AS a user GIVEN I’m on the settings page, WHEN I change the text in the profile header box, THEN my profile header should be updated.’

Game Play:

Steps 
1. Release Planning:
Given a velocity and a set of User stories, have your business decision 
players pick out stories until the team's budget, based on their velocity is 
full.  
BUSINESS DECISION PLAYERS CANNOT ALLOCATE MORE STORIES THAN FIT INSIDE THE 
RELEASE TIME FRAME
<sub>The release time frame is usually 2-4 months...</sub> 

2. Iteration Planning: 
Once a release is fully flushed out, the team can begin specifying the stories 
to complete in a short (usually 2-3 week) iteration.  The iteration will end 
on specific date, regardless of whether or not all the stories have been 
completed.  
ONCE AN ITERATION HAS BEGUN THE STORIES WITHIN SAID ITERATION CANNOT BE CHANGED
3. Task Planning:
A task is something one developer can do in 4-16 hours. All of the task for an 
iteration are laid out in table, and developers, regardless of specialty pull 
task one by one until the table is empty.  Each developer should have their 
own personal budget which determines the amount of task they can pull off the 
table.