The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). The RTE’s major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. That responsibility falls to the RTE or STE, who operate most effectively as servant leaders.

Understand and operate within Lean Budgets and ensure adherence to Guardrails. Facilitate System Demos and Solution Demos. Drive relentless improvement via Inspect and Adapt workshops; assess the agility level of the ART and Solution Train and help them improve.

Terms in this set (528) The Release Train Engineer (RTE) facilitates Agile Release Train processes and execution. The RTE escalate impediments, helps manage risk, helps ensure value delivery, and drives continuous improvement. Systems thinking, Agile development, and Lean product development.

Instead of being the judge, the release train engineer has to be an excellent guide, motivator, coach and mentor to the teams. They need to be an exceptional leader. They need to exude confidence and their commitment to the vision in fulfilling the objectives of the Program Increment.

Release on Demand is the process that deploys new functionality into production and releases it immediately or incrementally to customers based on demand. The three aspects that precede Release on Demand help ensure that new functionality is continuously readied and verified in the production environment.

The four Core Values of alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution represent the fundamental beliefs that are key to SAFe’s effectiveness. These guiding principles help dictate behavior and action for everyone who participates in a SAFe portfolio.

Underlying principles of SAFe Assume variability; preserve options. Build incrementally with fast integrated learning cycles. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems. Visualize and limit work-in-progress, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths.

The 3-Level SAFe is implemented at the following levels: team, program and portfolio.

The Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, methodology is an agile framework for development teams built on three pillars: Team, Program, and Portfolio. SAFe is designed to give a team flexibility and to help manage some of the challenges larger organizations have when practicing agile.

Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) empowers complex organizations to achieve the benefits of Lean-Agile software and systems development at scale. SAFe is the world’s leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise.

Agile is an iterative method used for developing a product that focuses on the continuous delivery of tasks assigned. SAFe, on the other hand, is an agile framework for an enterprise which is not limited to smaller teams and guides enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices.

Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision.

As the facilitator for the 2-day event, the Release Train Engineer presents the planning process and expected outcomes for the event, plus facilitates the Management Review and Problem Solving session and retrospective.

Treasure hunts and scavenger hunts are another fun way to get people working together. Give each team member a list of things to find or do, like visit another team to find program risks and dependencies and determine whether or not they impact the plan being created.

The PI Planning event is two days of focused planning with all the teams, stakeholders, and product owners/managers in one place to review the program backlog and determine the direction of the business.

The importance of the Business Owner’s role during PI planning cannot be overstated. They: Are ready and available to participate in key activities, including the presentation of vision, draft plan review, assigning business value to team PI objectives, and approving final plans.

Among other duties, they have specific responsibilities during PI Planning, where they participate in mission setting, planning, draft plan reviews, conducting management reviews, and problem-solving. They assign business value to Program PI Objectives and approve the PI plan.

A vote of confidence is held near the end of PI planning, where the teams commit to the PI objectives. During the course of the PI, if it’s discovered that some objectives are not achievable, then the teams agree to escalate immediately so that stakeholders are informed and corrective action can be taken.

A Program Increment (PI) is a timebox during which an Agile Release Train (ART) delivers incremental value in the form of working, tested software and systems. PIs are typically 8 – 12 weeks long. A PI is to an Agile Release Train (ART) (or Solution Train), as an Iteration is to the Agile Team.

In addition to opening lines of communication, the goal of a PI planning event is to: Create an Agile Release Train (ART). The ART aligns vision, planning, risks, and dependencies among the various teams to focus on fast, flexible development and release.

They are Continuous Integration, Test-First (including Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven Development), Refactoring, pair work, and collective ownership. Some teams use other XP practices, such as a pair programming, and system metaphors [3].

The post-PI planning event occurs after the ARTs have run their respective planning sessions and are used to synchronize the ARTs and create the overall solution plan and roadmap. Participants include the solution and key ART stakeholders.

The purpose of the PO Sync is to ensure alignment of the product vision and work-related content across all involved teams. SAFe® and Scrum at Scale scaling frameworks recommend this synchronization event. The PO Sync is held 1 – 2 times per week for approximately 30 minutes.

INVEST is an acronym which encompasses the following concepts which make up a good user story:

• Independent.
• Negotiable.
• Valuable.
• Estimable.
• Small.
• Testable.

What is the benefit of separating release elements from the Solution? It allows the release of different Solution elements at different times There is only one Fibonnaci Sequence. It is formed by adding the previous two numbers to get the next number in the sequence.

Broadly, there are four main types of enabler stories:

• Exploration – often referred to as a ‘spike’.
• Architecture – design a suitable architecture that describes the components in a system and how they relate to each other.
• Infrastructure – perform some work on the solution infrastructure.

Leading by Example

• Authenticity requires leaders to model desired professional and ethical behaviors.
• Emotional intelligence describes how leaders identify and manage their emotions and those of others through self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

Anyone can write user stories. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to make sure a product backlog of agile user stories exists, but that doesn’t mean that the product owner is the one who writes them. Over the course of a good agile project, you should expect to have user story examples written by each team member.

Tips for Breaking Down User Stories

1. Find your limits. Take a look at your team’s historical performance on differently sized stories.
2. Get epic. Sometimes it seems like a huge story will only add business value when it’s fully implemented.
3. Pull out your grammar books.
4. Take the path less chosen.
5. Testable is the best-able.
6. If you don’t know, now you know.