Release Train Engineer

It is a misuse of our power to take responsibility for solving problems that belong to others.

– Peter Block, Stewardship [1]

Definition: The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and ART coach who facilitates ART events and processes, and supports teams in delivering value.

What is a Release Train Engineer?

The Release Train Engineer (RTE) acts as a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). They make ART events and practices run smoothly and help the Agile Teams succeed. The RTE communicates with stakeholders, facilitates problem-solving, and helps to manage risks.

The RTE is part of the ART leadership that includes Product Management, the System Architect and Business Owners. Product Management determines what gets built by the ART to achieve the Vision. The System Architect designs the overall architecture for the systems and products the ART develops. The Business Owners are accountable for the ART’s business outcomes, such as ROI, governance, and compliance.  The RTE ensures this group works effectively together.

ARTs consist of self-organizing and self-managing teams. However, as a team of teams, they require some coordination. To support this, the RTE facilitates ART events and practices and provides coaching to the ART during PI execution. They play a pivotal role in escalating impediments, managing risks, and ensuring that value is delivered effectively while fostering continuous improvement.

In addition to their role on the ART RTEs often support the wider Lean-Agile transformation. With their knowledge of Lean and Agile ways of working, they are well suited to coach leaders, teams, and Scrum Master/Team Coaches (SM/TCs).

When people transition from previous roles to become RTEs, they may already have experience managing and organizing work. However, it is critical that they adopt a servant leadership approach. This means changing from telling people what to do to helping support and guide people to discover what to do themselves. This approach helps teams and ARTs to become self-organizing and self-managing.

Examples of this approach include:

• Supporting the teams as needed to help them meet their commitments
• Creating space for problem-solving and facilitating decision-making
• Identifying opportunities for Agile Teams, leaders, and stakeholders to collaborate
• Creating an environment where everyone on the ART can share challenges openly
• Applying systems thinking to improve the flow of work
• Being open to new ideas and coaching others to do so as well

What are the responsibilities of a Release Train Engineer?

The RTE is focused primarily on the five types of activities illustrated in Figure 1. The sections that follow describe each responsibility.

Facilitating PI Planning

PI Planning is an ART event that takes place every 8-12 weeks. It aligns all the Agile Teams, stakeholders, and ART leadership to a shared mission, vision, and plan. RTEs play a vital role in this critical event and typically:

• Help the ART prepare for PI planning – The RTE ensures readiness for PI Planning in three main areas:
  • Facilitating the continuous exploration process to help evolve the ART vision and roadmap. Ensuring the ART backlog is aligned with strategic priorities and ready for planning.
  • Ensuring ART leadership and teams are aligned on priorities and prepared with the right content for the event.
  • Managing the logistical aspects of the event, such as facilities or the technology and tools for remote events.
• Facilitate the PI Planning event – An effective RTE typically does the following activities to help facilitate PI Planning:
  • On the first day of planning, the RTE opens the event and discusses the purpose, agenda, working agreements, planning process, expectations, and other logistics. They also introduce speakers who present the business context, product vision, architectural vision, and development practices. They conduct the Coach Sync during the team breakouts and oversee the draft plan reviews and management review problem-solving meetings.
  • On the second day of planning, the RTE facilitates planning adjustments, the Coach Sync, conducts final plan reviews, addresses ART PI risks, and ensures the ART planning board is current. They hold a confidence vote, facilitate planning rework if needed, and conclude the event with the planning retrospective and moving forward instructions. 

Supporting PI execution

RTEs have significant accountability for the successful execution of the PI. They contribute to that success by assuming the following responsibilities during the PI:

• Maintain progress – The RTE assists in tracking the completion of features in the ART backlog, represented as a Kanban. RTEs coordinate impediment removal and address or escalate problems that the teams cannot resolve independently. Moreover, they ensure the teams use the System Demo effectively as the primary measure of progress.
• Facilitate ART events –These events include the ART Sync, System Demos, and Inspect and Adapt. They help the ART manage PI risks and dependencies using the ROAM technique and the ART planning board. They also ensure follow-up occurs regarding event feedback.
• Support ART backlog refinement – The RTE collaborates with Product and Solution Management, Business Owners, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to help ensure the backlog remains aligned with strategy.  They identify and apply measurements that enable the ART to achieve a smooth, predictable flow of value.
• Promote DevOps and continuous delivery—DevOps is a mindset, culture, and set of technical practices that support the integration, automation, and collaboration needed to develop and operate a solution effectively. The RTE coaches DevOps across all the ART. They help coordinate product releases and plan the milestones to deliver the integrated solution. This includes creating an ART-level definition of done.
• Assist Business Owners – The RTE supports economic decision-making for Epics, facilitating Feature creation by Agile Teams. They understand and operate within Lean Budgets, ensuring adherence to Guardrails. The RTE helps Business Owners coordinate and communicate effectively across the ART.
• Coordinate planning efforts with other ARTs – Multiple ARTs may need to align and collaborate to deliver the best customer outcomes. The RTE establishes and communicates the dates for Iterations and PIs and schedules any cross-ART pre-planning activities.

Coaching the ART

RTEs are the ART’s coach. In this role, they generally have the following types of responsibilities:

• Coach with powerful questions – RTEs coach using open-ended questions that encourage deeper reflection and self-discovery. The RTE guides team members and leaders toward insights and actions that move the ART forward positively. What other possibilities or options exist? What is it we’re not seeing?
• Coach facilitation of ART and Team events and practices –This includes ART events such as PI planning, system demos, and Inspect and Adapt. They also help SMs/TCs create meaningful Agile Team events. The RTE shares facilitation techniques. They guide difficult conversations and help to manage attendees’ expectations. They encourage experimenting with approaches that improve each event and practice over time.
• Coach ART roles –The RTE coaches Business Owners, System Architects, and Product Managers. They encourage collaboration between the teams and the System Architects. They act as a sounding board for ideas and provide support during challenging moments.

Optimizing flow

Agile Teams and ARTs strive to achieve a state of continuous value flow. RTEs are typically responsible for improving flow in the following ways:

• Establish the ART Kanban system – The RTE uses the ART Kanban to ensure a smooth flow of value. The RTE works with others to visualize all features in process. They identify flow states and maintain WIP limits across the work of the ART.
• Establish ART flow measures – These include the six flow metrics, such as flow predictability, which identifies how predictable Agile Teams and trains deliver business value against their planned objectives. The flow time of the ART measures the total elapsed time to deliver new features. The RTE helps ensure data is available to calculate these measures.
• Improve the flow of value – The RTE helps improve the flow of value by assessing and improving the practices associated with DevOps and the continuous delivery pipeline. Moreover, they coach the ART to apply the eight flow accelerators.
• Facilitate value stream mapping – The RTE maps the value stream with the Agile Teams and stakeholders. This involves identifying all the steps the ART goes through, from an idea to delivering value. The map includes handoffs, bottlenecks, and delays. This mapping highlights how much of the total flow time is active time and how much is wait time. The RTE helps the teams use the data for improvement.
• Reduce or eliminate cross-team dependencies – The RTE reviews patterns from the ART planning boards to identify potential improvements to the organizational design of the ART and teams.  They identify dependencies that are inhibiting flow and proactively work with stakeholders and leaders to address them.

Improving relentlessly

Relentless improvement is central to Lean and one of SAFe’s four core values. The RTE typically facilitates the following types of improvement activities:

• Drive relentless improvement – The RTE fosters the pursuit of perfection via the Inspect and Adapt problem-solving workshop. They support just-in-time improvement throughout the PI, leveraging the Coach Syncs, PO Syncs, and communities of practice. They also promote the use of built-in quality practices.
• Leverage the SAFe core competency assessments – The RTE periodically facilitates the SAFe core competency assessments. The assessments result in actions to help the ART members increase their mastery of Lean-Agile practices.
• Collaborate with the Value Management Office (VMO) and the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) – The RTE is key to sharing information and providing feedback to the groups that lead the wider transformation activities across the organization. They provide feedback on the feasibility and effort needed to implement new ways of working. The RTE brings improvements to their ART that are connected to the overall transformation strategy.

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References

[1] Block, Peter. Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self–Interest. Berrett–Koehler Publishers, 2013.

Leffingwell, Dean. Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010.