What is Rolling Wave Planning?
Rolling wave planning means planning near-term work in detail and leaving far-future work at a higher level, elaborating each "wave" as it approaches. It's the honest answer to a simple truth: detail invented twelve months early is fiction with formatting.
It's a form of progressive elaboration and the philosophical bridge between predictive and agile approaches — sprints are essentially rolling waves with a fixed length. On the exam, if the scenario says late phases "can't be defined yet," rolling wave is usually the technique being described.
Worked example
A two-year plant-modernization program plans the next quarter down to daily tasks, the following two quarters at work-package level, and year two as milestone placeholders. Every quarter-end, the team details the next wave using what the last one taught them — estimates get sharper instead of staler.