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Comment by dsalfdslfdsa | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the reflection at the end of each cycle is a useful way to make the team feel empowered and in control of their destiny, while all that happens in reality is that they complain to each other once a sprint and the damage is safely contained without bothering management.

Also, what is so bad about quarterly planning? Not everything ships immediately - this shows a very strong web app bias.

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Yeah that happens but that same meeting can be used to address that and get the team back on productive conversations. The team needs to align with the goals though and often this is not properly communicated and everyone is pulling in their own direction.

Quarterly planning sets quarter level expectations but each cycle is meant to set bi-monthly expectations for the purpose of changing directions if needed. They are at odds with each other, if you do sprints properly, quarterly planning will almost always change, and if you try to adhere to the quarter estimates then sprints are not needed other than to micromanage that quarterly commitment.

How do you plan anything that needs a longer-term view than two weeks (which is most software development except web apps)?

If doing scrum, you don't do the long term estimating. You have goals but they're not slotted into a timeline, instead they are iterated on sprint by sprint until it's done. You can do projections but even those have to be taken lightly because the point of sprints is to change direction if needed.

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