Scaling Software Agility

Agile Release Train Community of Practice

As those of you familiar with Scaling Software Agility, Agile Software Requirements or this blog know, the Agile Release Train is the mechanism I like to recommend whenever an enterprise needs to harness a significant number of agile teams (5-10-15) to a common mission. And in the larger enterprise, that’s pretty often. As I described in Chapter 15 of ASR, in more abstract terms, the ART is used to:

1. Drive strategic alignment
2. Institutionalize product development flow

The agile release train, is implied in the Big Picture:Scaled Agile Delivery Model, as seen below:

A number of large software enterprises are using this or a similar mechanism (an uber sprint?) to build larger scale, fully agile programs. In so doing, a number of new best-practices-at-real-agile-scale,  are starting to emerge.

My colleague Jorgen Hesselberg, is organizing a small community of practice to explore both challenges and patterns of success. I know some of the likely participants, and I can assure you there will be some lively discussions about some of the largest agile enterprise initiatives. Topics for this COP are likely to include:

• organizing trains around value streams
• preapring for the release planning event
• running the event
• release planning at scale (50-100 largely co-located devs and testers) and super scale (100-200 distributed, mutli-site, concurrent planning)
• roles and responsibilities
• release train governance (keeping the train on the tracks, PMO involvement, etc)
• metrics
• coordinating epics across multiple trains

If you’d like to participate, contact Jorgen at jorgen.hesselberg@navteq.com.

If this comes together, I’ll certainly be blogging about the process and results of this strategically interesting, agile-at-scale COP as soon as they become available.