The foundation of agile transformation is breaking down a monolithic application into the smallest possible units and building them iteratively and incrementally. Sometimes, in focusing on the smallest units, the bigger picture might be lost.
In response to that conundrum came the Agile Release Train. Let’s see what it is and how it helps.
How to Reach Goals With an Agile Release Train
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat’s an Agile Release Train?
An agile release train (ART) is a team of agile teams that builds solutions in a value stream. A typical agile release train is:
- Long-lived, with experienced team members holding the fort
- Aligned to a shared business and technology mission
- Organized around the enterprise’s value streams
- A team of teams, typically including 50-125 people
- Cross-functional with capabilities to define, build, release, operate, and maintain software
The Scaled Agile Framework visualizes the agile release train as follows.
Why do we need an Agile Release Train?
Within large organizations, even those that follow agile development and project management, there can be silos that inhibit value delivery. For instance, each business unit might have their own agile teams working in silos, duplicating work. The agile release train model prevents this.
Effective hand-offs: The larger teams facilitate faster flow of information, enabling better hand-offs.
Meaningful collaboration: Silos often have leadership and political systems that prevent collaboration. ARTs circumvent that by design.
Value-focus: ART ensures that an organization delivers on the promised value by building solutions that create customer value.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCore Principles of an Agile Release Train
The agile software development world is filled with frameworks and models that can help teams do more, better, or faster. Scrum is a popular development approach. Kanban is a preferred project management style. DevOps vs. agile is a never-ending debate.
To truly understand what Agile Release Trains mean and how they work, let’s begin with its core principles. In addition to agile scrum principles such as iterative development, continuous improvement, cross-functional collaboration, customer focus, etc., here are some specific ART principles.
Organized around value
Instead of organizing teams around functions or departments, the ART is structured around development value streams. Leveraging lean thinking, agile release trains bring together a set of agile teams that can deliver and support a significant product.
Additionally, when the value stream is expired, the market has changed, or the organization has pivoted, ARTs can be reorganized around other value on the network.
Team alignment
Agile release trains are aligned to shared business and technology missions. This principle is crucial for maintaining coherence and focus across multiple agile teams.
One of the ways in which ARTs ensure alignment is through comprehensive Program Increment (PI) planning. During PI planning, all teams within the agile release train come together to set shared goals, understand dependencies, and establish a collective roadmap.
Built-in quality
Agile teams that form the ART come together to set standards for product quality. They choose practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) or automated agile testing to strengthen delivery.
These practices help identify and address defects early, reduce technical debt, and ensure that the final product meets the required standards across the organization.
Common cadence and synchronization
Agile teams often work independently. This hinders real-time collaboration and a big-picture view of organizational value. Agile release trains solve this problem by emphasizing the importance of two principles:
- Cadence: Events conducted on a regular basis, such as system demos, iteration planning, etc.
- Synchronization: Scheduling sprints, iterations, and PI cycles concurrently among all the teams in the ART to better manage dependencies
This ensures that iterations and continuous improvement aren’t restricted to the individual units and that the entire system evolves cohesively.
Held together by critical roles
Each agile team within the ART has cross-functional roles. However, to hold the ART together as a functioning unit, a few rules are designed.
- Release train engineer: Like a Scrum Master, release train engineers enable execution, remove roadblocks, coach teams, etc.
- Product manager: Oversees the ART backlog and makes decisions around the product’s roadmap
- System architect: Defines the architecture of the solutions in the value stream
- Business owners: Ensure alignment with business outcomes
Now that you understand how agile release trains fit into the context of agile software development, let’s see how you can implement the framework in your organization.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Implement an Agile Release Train
In essence, agile release train is a virtual organization, without the traditional hierarchical structure. So, it is a collection of teams working on sprints, products, iterations, user stories, and bugs within the value stream.
To keep the coaches together and steer it in the right direction, implement your agile release train thoughtfully. A good agile project management tool like ClickUp can offer a significant boost. Here’s how.
1. Define the value stream
Start by defining the value stream. Value streams are typically of two types:
- Operational: Steps to deliver a product/service to the customer. This could be manufacturing, e-commerce, fulfillment, payment processing, etc.
- Development: Steps to convert a business process into a technology product
While these are closely interrelated, agile release trains are concerned more with the development value stream.
Identify the primary value your teams deliver to the customer and map the process from concept to delivery. Conduct workshops with key stakeholders to gather detailed insights into how value flows through your organization—document every step, from initial idea generation to final delivery and support.
ClickUp Whiteboards is a great place to map your processes visually, sharing with everyone on the team for asynchronous collaboration later if needed. Given it’s a digital agile tool, you can, of course, update the value stream as it evolves.
2. Organize teams around the value stream
Assemble 5-12 agile teams, each focusing on different aspects of the value stream while working towards the same overarching goal. Ensure each team is cross-functional, with developers, testers, designers, and product owners.
For instance, one team might handle frontend development while another manages backend services, yet both work towards the same release planning for developers. Clear roles and responsibilities within each team help to optimize collaboration and efficiency.
3. Create a program backlog
Create a program backlog to serve as the single source of truth for what the ART will build.
- Populate with features derived from the value stream mapping
- Work with product owners to prioritize items based on their value to the customer and the overall business strategy
- Make every item on the backlog well-defined with clear acceptance criteria
- Regularly review and update the backlog to reflect changing priorities and new insights
This backlog guides the work of all teams within the ART, ensuring alignment and focus. Therefore, a centralized tool like ClickUp tasks is necessary to keep all the information in one place.
Within ClickUp tasks, you can add a description for each item on the backlog, set acceptance criteria on checklists, assign to the respective team member, collaborate using nested comments, set priority, customize task types, and more.
4. Plan your program increments
Schedule program increment planning meetings on a regular cadence to align all teams on the ART towards common goals and deliverables. Each increment typically lasts 8-12 weeks. You can automate this as a recurring event on the ClickUp Calendar view.
Bonus: If you’re new to sprint planning, here’s everything you need to know about agile release planning for developers.
5. Set goals
With a 50-125 member team running increments of 8-12 weeks, the project can become unwieldy. Setting clear goals and tracking them regularly can fix that. So, create a system teams can use to point their focus towards.
Use ClickUp Goals to:
- Set targets as numerical, monetary, true/false, or tasks
- Create sprint targets, increment targets, etc.
- Connect tasks to goals and automatically track progress
- Publish goals so the entire team can see the progress
6. Review and adjust
Build reporting: Track progress on all your goals in one place. Choose the metrics that are important to your agile workflows and create customized reports.
For example, with the help of agile burndown charts, you can accurately track each sprint’s progress. Burnup charts, cumulative workload view, team velocity, etc., will provide valuable insights.
Conduct retrospectives: Review performance at the end of each PI to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t. Use this feedback to improve processes and practices continuously.
Encourage open and honest feedback: Create a culture of continuous and timely feedback among members of all agile teams. Here’s why that’s necessary.
Bonus: For inspiration, see how Gabriel Hoffman, solutions engineer at ZenPilot, uses ClickUp to implement scrum.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Role of Feedback in Agile Release Trains
Within all agile models of working, feedback plays a crucial role. The same is true in agile release trains.
Business feedback: ARTs collaborate with business teams to understand if the solution delivered has met the business goals.
Customer feedback: ARTs actively seek customer feedback on their increments as a way to validate value. This could be performed internally, like tracking usage, retention rates, social media reviews, etc. Or in collaboration with the user, like surveys or interviews.
Technology feedback: ARTs run regular integration testing and technical spikes to collect tech feedback. Several monitoring processes also give feedback to the infra team.
Team feedback: Multiple teams working together as one unit need honest and trusting feedback. ART teams speak openly in reviews and retrospectives to understand the behavioral aspects of working together and iron them out as needed.
Project management feedback: Another key aspect of feedback is how well the projects are managed. Resource utilization, timeliness of delivery, adherence to standards, etc. can be derived from project management dashboards, which can be used to improve productivity and efficiency.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Impact of Agile Release Trains on Software Development Process
Since the turn of the century, software development has undergone a sea change. Agile development teams of the past suffered from:
Fragmented teams: Traditional agile teams worked well within themselves, with great local optimization. However, organization-wide, silos remained with limited coordination, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies.
Inconsistent quality: Fragmented teams had different quality standards, leading to inconsistent products and higher bugs across the value chain.
Slow feedback loops: Feedback from stakeholders and users was slow, which is somewhat counter-productive to the accelerated sprint cycles the teams were going for.
Suboptimal collaboration: Independent teams worked asynchronously, creating gaps in visibility and affecting the big picture.
Agile release trains came as a solution to all these problems that software development teams face. It brought the benefits of agile to serve the needs of large, complex organizations.
With ART, enterprises achieved:
Value realization: The value-stream driven approach of ART ensures that all the software development work is focused on delivering customer value.
Better team coordination: ART brought multiple agile teams together systematically, fostering better coordination and alignment around shared goals and objectives.
Built-in quality: Quality practices were integrated into every development phase, leading to consistent and high-quality outputs across the value stream.
Rapid feedback loops: Synchronization and common cadence ensure timely reviews and retrospectives for quicker feedback and more responsive adjustments.
Accelerated delivery: ART enabled shorter, more predictable delivery cycles, allowing for quicker releases and better adaptability to market changes.
Challenges in implementing agile release trains
Despite it’s several benefits outlined above, implementing an agile release train is not without its challenges. When agile teams embrace ART, they might be faced with the following.
Cultural shift
Adopting ART requires a significant cultural shift within the organization. Teams that are used to working in small setups, independently and asynchronously, might find the larger structure of ART unsettling.
For instance, synchronized sprints or common cadence for retrospectives might feel stifling. To avoid this disruption, ART leaders must introduce the idea slowly and build consensus within the organization.
Initial learning curve
The initial learning curve in understanding and adopting ART practices can be steep for many teams. ART introduces new roles, ceremonies, and practices that team members must quickly learn and integrate into their daily workflows.
For instance, the Inspect & Adapt (I&A) is conducted at the beginning of every iteration, in addition to the retrospective at the end of each iteration.
Providing comprehensive training, resources, and mentorship can help mitigate this challenge, enabling teams to transition more smoothly and start realizing the benefits of ART.
Dependency management
Managing dependencies across multiple teams within an agile release train can be a bit of a nightmare. Ensuring all teams are aligned and their work integrates smoothly requires meticulous planning and coordination.
To avoid this, set up:
- Clear communication channels: For instance, ClickUp Chat view consolidates all messages ensuring that nothing gets missed even if there’s a lot of noise
- Visual management tools: A dependency board—mapping tasks that are dependent on one another—helps teams identify and address dependencies early
Summarize this article for me pleaseEffectively Manage Your Agile Release Train With ClickUp
Agile practices are fantastic for small software development teams. In fact, agile recommends breaking down large teams into smaller units for better efficiency and quality.
However, this often creates a problem of scale. Agile release trains are the answer to the problem of scaling agile practices across large organizations. Great agile release trains align multiple teams around shared goals, synchronize efforts, build coherence in solutioning, and deliver on business value streams.
Implementing and managing an ambitious framework like the agile release train requires a robust, comprehensive, flexible, and customizable project management tool. From outlining tasks to managing dependencies, it needs to do everything.
ClickUp is designed for exactly that. ClickUp for agile teams empowers you to manage value streams—and sunset the ones you’re done with—effortlessly. It allows you to see the big picture as well as zoom into the nitty-gritty detail. It serves individuals, projects, teams, and team of teams, like the agile release train.
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