Prominent experts still saying that planning equates to looking forward to a date and "making a prediction of what would be delivered by then". No! Planning is figuring out what you need to DO to meet an objective. Any "prediction" you want to take from that is a by-product. 1/
This expert's line of reasoning is like saying "it will be a 5 hour drive" equates to planning a road trip. No! Which car should we use? What do we need? What roads will we take? Where should we turn? What is the best time to leave? Where should we stop? *That's* planning. 2/
Proper planning, done frequently, is so critical to an incremental and iterative way of working. But it seems folks are still being told to predict things as the focus of their planning activity rather than to actually plan how to do the work to meet the objective. 3/
The whole point of having short planning and delivery cycles in e.g. Scrum is precisely because we *don't* want to be making predictions beyond a couple of weeks at most. Plan-Do-Check-Act in a Sprint, do it again in the next, etc. Empiricism is the opposite of being predictive.
"Release planning" is not deciding how many story points you can deliver by a deadline. It's deciding what the focus of the release will be. What is the simplest useful slice of capability we can build & release to a subset of (potential) customers. Prediction is the wrong focus.
"Planning is the process of thinking about the activities required to achieve a desired goal. It is the first & foremost activity to achieve desired results. It involves the creation & maintenance of a plan, such as psychological aspects that require conceptual skills." Wikipedia
Once you have created your plan (e.g. Sprint backlog), you are now implicitly saying "this is what I plan to do/achieve within the time constraint". Sure, that's your "forecast", a by-product of your planning. Very different from putting an emphasis on "how much" you'll get done.
And of course you will create a new plan in the next sprint, & the next. You'll monitor progress toward broader objectives primarily using empirical measures such as working product, customer usage, pirate metrics & so on. This thread, my friends, is how "agile" planning works.
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