Our teams do Scrum. The lowest level of inspect-adapt-loop is the Daily Scrum. Above that are the Sprints that usually take one to four weeks. Most common is probably two weeks. This level is planned solely by the Scrum Team.
Our Sprints belong to Releases. We are currently satisfied with a pace of four releases per year. That means that a release comes every three months. With two week Sprints it means that we can fit six Sprint per one Release.
I know that in the most pure form of Scrum, teams produce each Sprint potentially releasable content. And there are probably no bugs. Unfortunately my version of reality contains a legacy product that has some known bugs. And since we have a long history and some dependencies, we really need to do some integration testing at the end of the Release cycle.
So we carry out an extensive Release testing at the end of each Release cycle. Currently we have reserved the whole third month of each Release for this, but the teams are free to use their best judgement on this. If they have everything tested in time, they can start new development already before the Release period is over.
The idea of four releases per year is actually taken from Scaled Agile Framework. We do not want to re-invent the wheel, so we rather use practices that someone else has found useful.
Release planning is carried out between Product Managers and Product Owners. Of course in the end the team needs to "accept" the plan, so we iterate until a mutual agreement is found.
Beyond the Release level are the Product Managers Roadmap and product Vision. And even above this is the Strategy. This whole setup is rather new, so I'll tell more once we have experimented a bit further.
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