TABLE OF CONTENTS Planning XP projects the very idea! It is a common misconception that XP projects do not need to be planned. Even reading the last chapter may or may not have helped this view. This may partly be because the planning aspect of XP is known as "The Planning Game" (ah ha it's a game so not to be taken seriously) but as we said, if this is a problem then consider this as the Project Planning Workshop (which to be fair is a rather more accurate description of its purpose). Secondly, however, they may remain un-convinced because the nature of project planning changes. Rather than planning out the whole project in great and fine-grained detail, the overall project plan is left rather vague and high level and detailed plans are only created on an iteration-by-iteration or release-by-release basis. From personal experience, I can vouch that not only does this approach work very well but that it actually involves far more planning, which is more accurate reflecting what is actually happening on the project and is reviewed more often than the traditional approach.
So what is the aim of the game/planning workshop? It is to decide on the scope and priorities of the project and of the releases. It is also to estimate the cost of various features required by the software and to schedule those features into releases. Note that I am using the term feature here as depending on the type of planning being done,...
