What is the purpose of a release plan?

A release plan serves as a strategic document that outlines the expectations for feature delivery to all project stakeholders, ensuring clear communication regarding what features are expected to be delivered and when. This helps align the team and stakeholders on the project’s goals and timelines, facilitating informed decision-making and prioritizing efforts.

By providing visibility into delivery milestones and the features expected within each release, a release plan helps manage stakeholder expectations and builds trust in the development process. This is crucial because stakeholders often rely on the release plan to plan their activities, training, marketing strategies, and resource allocation around the release of new features.

While other options address important aspects of project management—such as communication within the development team, deployment processes, and documentation of blockers—they do not capture the primary purpose of a release plan, which focuses on communicating feature delivery to stakeholders.