Agile Release Train

The more alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant. The one enables the other.

—Stephen Bungay, author and strategy consultant [1]

Definition: The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams that incrementally develops, delivers, and often operates one or more solutions in a development value stream.

What is an Agile Release Train?

An Agile Release Train (ART) is a team of Agile Teams aligned to a set of shared business and technology goals. ARTs are generally made up of 50 -125 people. They are cross-functional and have all the capabilities needed to define, build, validate, release, and, where applicable, operate one or more solutions.

When a product or solution is too large for a single Agile Team to deliver, an ART effectively creates alignment across multiple teams and a common way of working. This approach helps Agile Teams work together more smoothly and ensures that the value they are developing is ready for use at the same time. Agile Teams can deliver products to the market more efficiently and with better quality, surpassing what the enterprise could do with a less organized approach.

Each ART works from an ART backlog, which contains the features that the Agile Teams on that ART develop to meet their customers’ needs. The ART creates and maintains a continuous delivery pipeline needed to develop and release value.

How to organize an Agile Release Train?

In a “functionally siloed” organization, developers work with other developers, testers work with testers, architects and systems engineers stick together, and operations staff work alone. This setup came to be for various reasons, but it slows things down because work must move through all these separate groups. Managers must coordinate the handoff of the work from one group to another, which slows things down and introduces delays.

In contrast, an ART has all the people needed to define, deliver, and operate the solution, eliminating these functional silos (Figure 2). This facilitates the fast flow of value from ideation through deployment and release. The ART is self-organizing and self-managing, so work gets done faster and smoother without unnecessary overheads.

Who is on the ART?

Agile Teams power the ART. Agile Teams on an ART use SAFe Scrum, SAFe Kanban, or a mix of both, depending on what works best for each team. Collaborating with other Agile Teams, they build entire solutions working from a common ART .

Agile Teams may be technical teams focused on building software or hardware products, business teams such as marketing, legal, or finance, or a blend of each. Regardless, all the Agile Teams on the ART are aligned to a common vision and roadmap and participate in ART events. Together, the teams on the ART continually optimize their practices, accelerating value delivery.

ARTs also have specific ART leadership roles that support and coordinate the Agile Teams. The following ART leadership roles aid the successful execution of the ART:

• Product Management – One or more individuals primarily in charge of determining what gets built, based on the Vision, Roadmap, and Features in the ART Backlog. They collaborate with customers, teams, and Product Owners to understand their needs and help validate the solutions being developed.
• System Architect—An individual or team that defines the system’s overall architecture. Their job often involves deciding on the system’s key performance and operational standards (Nonfunctional Requirements—NFRs), its primary components and subsystems, and how these parts connect and interact.
• Release Train Engineer (RTE) – An individual who focuses on ART execution, removes obstacles, accelerates value delivery, manages risks and dependencies, and fosters continuous improvement.
• Business Owner(s) – The primary stakeholder(s) in the Agile Release Train (ART). They are responsible for the ART’s business outcomes, including return on investment (ROI), governance, and compliance.

In addition to the above critical ART roles, the following play an important role in success:

• Shared Services are specialists who cannot be dedicated to a single ART. They often include data security, legal or compliance specialists, site reliability engineering (SRE), and many more.
• Epic Owners collaborate with stakeholders to create Epics, which represent significant solution development initiatives. This includes defining a Lean Business Case and MVP. They also collaborate with the ART and Agile Teams to guide the Epic through development. ARTs do not always work on Epics, so Epic Owners are not always involved with every ART.
• A System Team is a specialized Agile Team that may be created to assist in building and maintaining development, continuous integration, and test environments.
• Customers are the ultimate buyers or users of the solution. Agile Teams and ART leaders consistently apply customer-centric practices. When possible, customer involvement in ART events and activities can greatly improve outcomes.

How does an Agile Release Train operate?

ARTs address one of the most common problems with traditional Agile development: teams working on the same solution operate independently and asynchronously. This makes it extremely difficult to integrate the entire system routinely. In other words, ‘The teams are iterating, but the system isn’t.’ This increases the risk of issues and problems being discovered late.

Instead, the Agile Teams on an ART are aligned on a common cadence. They synchronize key activities, as shown in Figure 3, to ensure that the system is iterating together. Cadence and synchronization help keep everyone focused on improving and checking the whole system, not just parts of it.

Planning Intervals (PIs) provide the development rhythm for ARTs. PIs are typically 8-12 weeks long. A typical format for a PI includes four or five iterations of development followed by one iteration focused on innovation and planning. During each PI, the ART events ensure a complete Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle, which resembles a scaled-up version of the events that each Agile Team follows, as shown in Figure 4 below.

PI Planning creates the opportunity for everyone on the ART to align to the highest priority work for the business. The Agile Teams have the time needed to estimate what they can deliver, identify dependencies, and commit to a set of PI Objectives. During the PI the teams maintain alignment to the plan through ART synch events. They demonstrate the integrated solution in each iteration at a System Demo. At the end of the PI, the entire ART engages in an Inspect and Adapt event focused on identifying improvement actions to take into the next PI.

What are the responsibilities of an Agile Release Train?

The ultimate purpose of every ART is to deliver valuable solutions to the customer. To achieve that, an ART develops the solution iteratively, constantly engaging with the customer and adjusting the course of action toward an optimal solution.

Figure 5 shows the critical areas of responsibility of an ART that help achieve that objective. The responsibilities of an Agile Team and an ART are the same. Explained below are the specifics to consider when Agile Teams are formed into an ART:

Connecting with the Customer

Customers are the ultimate economic buyers or value users of the solution an ART delivers. However, really connecting with the customer takes serious work and a good grasp of how to use lean and agile ways inside each ART’s context.

• Apply customer centricity – An ART routinely focuses on customer needs and opportunities to benefit the customer. Customer Centricity is a necessary mindset for the entire ART. The ART works to increase and maintain customer empathy and continuously research better ways to solve customer problems. Sharing individual team research with the broader ART is critical to aligning the flow of value and innovation across the ART.
• Use design thinking – Design thinking includes a repeated process that helps teams create viable, desirable, feasible, and sustainable solutions. It encourages exploring many ideas and then narrowing them down to find innovative solutions that benefit users. ART leadership provides the opportunity for Agile Teams to apply and share design thinking methods. These methods help ensure that the team focuses on fulfilling the users’ needs, continuously delivering innovative improvements.
• Involve the customer in the development process – There is no substitute for direct customer input. Including it in a routine development process helps an ART move at a much higher speed. The ART avoids the costly mistake of building capabilities the customer doesn’t need or cannot use. Preparation for PI planning, the PI planning itself, and system demos provide venues for customer interaction.

Planning the Work

Planning crucial activities for an ART enables alignment across teams and stakeholders in terms of what and how to build within the next timebox. Alignment is one of the Core Values of SAFe, and ARTs, as a building block of a SAFe organization, have built-in means for achieving and sustaining alignment.

• Align ART priorities with portfolio strategy – Every ART should align with the portfolio’s overall strategy, guided by Strategic Themes toward shared goals. Alignment involves active engagement with portfolio stakeholders and including ART representatives in portfolio discussions. This coordination is aligned with the PI cadence. Epic Owners and Business Owners have primary roles in linking portfolio strategy to ART execution.
• Prepare for PI Planning – ART leadership, stakeholders, and the Agile Teams prepare for PI Planning. ART leadership maintains the vision and agrees on priorities for the next PI. Agile Teams refine features, assess capacity, and share emerging efforts, ensuring a smooth backlog flow across the ART.
• Plan the PI – PI planning creates alignment across the ART. Business Owners provide business and customer insights to the teams. Agile Teams then develop a plan to leverage technology and delivery capabilities for maximum business value. Agile teams create and agree with the ART leadership on the PI Objectives they can commit to delivering in the upcoming PI to achieve that business value.

Delivering Value

ARTs develop solution features by applying a cadence that involves key activities to keep the train on track. At certain points, an ART will release the newly created value to the customer.

• Frequently integrate and test – A fast development rhythm requires frequent integration and testing. This helps uncover technology and implementation problems early and gives the teams enough time to respond to the findings. An ART operates in excessive uncertainty and variability without recurring integration and testing. Built-in Quality and Team and Technical Agility provide guidance on these practices.
• Develop in short increments of value – An ART implements the PI as a series of short increments, each representing a small batch of integrated, tested, and demonstrable value. The ART’s iteration cadence provides a natural pace to create these increments. Each helps the ART learn about potential implementation challenges, get customer feedback, and agree on a decision point with possible course corrections for the rest of the PI.
• Regularly synchronize and adjust – While executing the PI, an ART has multiple checkpoints in the form of an ART Sync, which includes a Coaches Sync and PO Sync. These events increase visibility into the progress toward the current PI objectives and help the ART make timely adjustments.
• Build a continuous delivery pipeline – To effectively implement faster, more reliable development flow across the ART, it’s important to create a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP). The CDP allows teams to explore and integrate their work quickly with fewer errors for faster feedback. The ART, particularly the System Architect, also ensures system designs are loosely coupled, enabling teams to deploy independently.
• Establish a release process – Each ART develops a release process to fit its cycle, ensuring alignment with strategy, compliance with standards, customer impact, and support for release tasks. Frequent releases aim to speed up market delivery and a consistent schedule helps quickly overcome technical hurdles, boosting progress and satisfaction across Agile Teams within the ART.

Getting Feedback

Getting fast feedback is the primary component of an ART’s high development velocity: speed comes from fast learning and adaptation rather than from ‘working harder.’ Technology feedback results from integration and testing as well as running technical spikes. The feedback on the product value comes from the customer and business stakeholders. ARTs routinely:

• Measure business outcomes and usage – Customer use of solutions may reveal issues and opportunities that otherwise might remain invisible to the ART. Creating the data capture and analytics capabilities, however, requires investment in the train’s capacity, a proactive approach, and the use of Architectural Runway. Additionally, an ART must measure whether delivered solutions enable the desired business outcomes—the ultimate purpose of the ART’s effort.
• Perform routine testing – Successful solution development is contingent upon an ART’s ability to navigate the unknowns and make effective decisions. A/B testing enables effective decision-making and improves an ART’s development speed. Instead of prematurely committing to certain functionality, the ART creates two or more options and validates them with users, thus gaining a real sense of which alternative is performing better.
• Test User Experience – User Experience (UX) is essential to fully realizing the solution potential. But to provide a great experience, there needs to be a clear UX design and testing strategy. This includes creating hypotheses and building and assessing the basic features needed by users, asking them questions, or analyzing data.

Improving Relentlessly

An ART seeks to continuously improve the practices and interactions it uses to deliver customer value. There are many ways to measure and improve different aspects to achieve this goal:

• Measure competency, flow, and outcomes – Every ART should regularly assess against key applicable competencies. They also monitor their progress and use techniques to enhance workflow for continued improvement, often utilizing flow accelerators to identify and improve. Moreover, ARTs utilize the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to measure outcomes aimed at delivering customer and business value.
• Inspect & Adapt at regular intervals – At every PI boundary, an ART has an opportunity to look back at the last PI, identify problems, and take corrective action during the Inspect & Adapt (I&A) event. This is dedicated time to identify significant, systemic improvement opportunities.
• Make improvements on the fly – Every ART routinely discovers small, local, and tactical improvement opportunities. In most cases, it is best to address these as they occur without waiting for a formal improvement event. This achieves quick wins and preserves the I&A for issues that require more attention.
• Leverage Innovation & Planning Iteration – The IP Iteration offers an opportunity to allocate uninterrupted time to innovation and learning. This helps the ART to further advance its solution, technical infrastructure, and various processes.

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References

[1] Bungay, Stephen. The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results (10th Anniversary Edition). Nicholas Brealey, 2022.