ART or Agile Release Train for Dummies

Take a minute and think about the last time when you traveled in a train or a metro. Well, for most of us it may seem like ages now. However, you would have noticed, there are three types of travelers – solo, small groups, and large groups.

Imagine a train with three wagons (Red, Blue, and Purple) and an engine (Green). Since there would be a driver or conductor for the train, along with one or more helpers – engine will not have many people or a large group. For the three wagons, there would be travelers who are solo, in small groups, and in large groups, for each of the wagons.

In the context of (agile) IT world, each of these wagons represent functional units, and travelers are like team members or teams, working towards common goals.

Imagine a scenario where you are supposed to launch a banking website with many features, however for one of the features, say account opening based on user need - this feature will be divided in smaller workable items, which can be distributed among teams, to deliver the work quickly.

Now, the team Red (Red wagon) will be responsible to gather details from the users and the banking representative on the requirements. Then they will map these requirements to valuable or value generating stories (having details which could be understood by anyone) and prioritizing the work log based on interactions with clients and internal teams. These are generally the Product or Business teams. The role of this team is to continuously create feature benefit hypothesis based on market research and customer feedbacks, and prioritize the work to be done based on business expectations.

The team Blue, will understand the details from team Red, and start the development of the stories which can lead to usable and value generating user journeys for the end customers. The stories will be thoroughly validated against the requirements and the correctness. These will be handed over to the business teams or clients for verification. These are generally the development and testing teams. These team develop features which can be used by the end customers and keep them ready to be migrated to upper environments whenever deemed appropriate by the management.

Once the journeys (requirements) are complete and verified, the team Purple will be put these functionalities out for test (to access the market response), for a subset of the whole traffic or end user base. The activity data or any issues reported would be monitored and the details will be shared with all the teams to take corrective actions or to learn from the outcomes and make changes in the strategy. These are generally the data analysis or marketing analysis teams.

The role of the helpers (team Green) is to prioritize the work items, interact with business and teams, coordinate activities across these teams and track progress, while the driver chooses to use the digital switch to release the required feature to all the users, just like deciding when to make the brief halt when the designated station approaches. This is when the production releases are made. These are the product management and the scrum master teams.

In reality, for big engagements, there would be multiple project team working on various customer journeys and related features. Since these teams or wagons are interlinked and keep on passing smaller work items, from one wagon to another in a sequential and cyclical order, it keeps the workflow continuous and enhances productivity. Moreover, since there are shorter cycles in which the increments are done, it keeps the agility by keeping the feedback loop continuous and help integrate the learning quickly. In the simplest form and in the context of an agile world, this is known as ART or the Agile Release Train.