Using Release Trains to Get on Track

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

One problem when you have a program with agile projects and non-agile projects is how to marry the two parts. The agile projects deliver value every couple of weeks. The non-agile projects? Well, it’s possible they don’t deliver value for months to years.

In Managing Programs with Agile and Traditional Projects, I suggested that you start with deliverable-based planning and provide incremental delivery of something. One way to do that is to use release trains.

What Are Release Trains?
When you use release trains externally, you commit to yourself and to your customers to release your product on a particular date every quarter. The quarter is the iteration. If you are a program manager, you can ask your non-agile teams to consider an iteration of somewhere between six weeks and eight weeks. At worse, you can ask your non-agile project teams to commit to an iteration of 12 weeks.

In a program, you are not an external customer--you are internal. Because you are working with project teams--feature teams--you don’t need marketing collateral or training to be ready internally; you only need the software to be integrated and possibly to be married to the hardware. That is difficult enough--you want the non-agile project teams to start learning how to use deliverable-based planning in small chunks, and to focus on what the customer will be able to use…

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