Work Product Descriptor (Artifact): Iteration Plan
A fine-grained plan describing the objectives, work assignments, and evaluation criteria for the iteration.
Purpose

Communicate the objectives, task assignment, and evaluation criteria for a given iteration.

Relationships
Input ToMandatory: Optional:
  • None
External:
  • None
Main Description

The main objectives of the iteration plan is to provide the team with one central place for information regarding iteration objectives, detailed plan with task assignments, and evaluation results. This artifact also helps the team to monitor the progress of the iteration and keeps the results of the iteration assessment that may be usefull for improving the next one.

The task assignments for an iteration is a subset of all tasks on the Artifact: Work Items List, therefore the iteration plan ideally references those work items.

Properties
Optional
Planned
Illustrations
Templates
Reports
Examples
Key Considerations

Work items assigned to an iteration do not necessarily have the same priority. When selecting work items from the Work Items List, the iteration plan may end up having work items with different priorities (for example, you assign the remaining high priority work items, plus a few mid priority ones from the Work Items List). No matter what previous priorities the work items had, when assigned to an iteration the team has to make sure they are able to develop what has been assigned to the iteration, and deciding on what to develop first (or even develop things in parallel) on an iteration will vary from project to project, from iteration to iteration.

Tailoring
Representation Options

The level of detail/formality of the plan must be adapted to what you need to successfully meet these objectives.The plan could, for example, be captured on the following places:

  • a whiteboard listing the objectives, task assignments and evaluation criteria;
  • a 1-page document listing the objectives and evaluation criteria of the iteration, as well as referencing the Work Items List for assignments for that iteration;
  • a more complex document, supported by a Gantt or Pert chart in a project planning tool.
More Information
Checklists
Concepts
Guidelines