Scaled Agile 4.6 SAFE Release Train Engineer Certification Course
What is the cadence that an ART executes to
8-12-week, program increment
What does 'C" represent in the CALMR DevOp approach?
CULTURE. It represents the philosophy of shared responsibility for fast value delivery across the entire Value Stream.
What does the SAFe, Principle "Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers" enable workers to do?
Communicate across functional boundaries, Make decisions based on an understanding of the economics, Receive fast feedback about the efficacy of their solution, Participate in continuous, incremental learning and mastery, Participate in a more productive and fulfilling solution development process.
How does Lean-Agile Leadership support the Alignment Core Value
Communicating the mission by establishing and expressing the portfolio strategy and solution vision. Help organize the value stream and coordinate dependencies. Provide relevant briefings and participate in Program Increment (PI) Planning. Help with backlog visibility and review and preparation; constantly check for understanding.
Lean Portfolio Management manages portfolio operations and creates strategic alignment by
Connecting enterprise to portfolio strategy.
This Flow Stage makes the features available in production, where the business will determine the appropriate time to release them to customers.
Continuous Deployment
What are the names of the Flow Stages of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment.
The objective of a Solution Train is to
Coordinate multiple ARTS and suppliers, manage frequent integrations, continuously address compliance concerns, and architect for Scale, modularity, releasability and serviceability
What ceremonies are part of each team's iteration
Daily-stand-up, backlog refinement, Iteration Review and an Iteration Retrospective
What does the acronym CALMR stand for?
A CALMR Approach to DevOps
What do ARTs align teams to?
A common business and technology mission
What is Systems Thinking
A holistic approach to solution development, incorporating all aspects of a system and its environment into the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of the system itself.
What is the Inspect and Adapt workshop
A larger, cadence-based opportunity for the ART to come together to address the systemic impediments they're facing.
What does the Innovation and planning iterations provide
A regular, cadence-based opportunity, every PI, for teams to work on activities that are difficult to fit into a continuous, incremental value delivery pattern.
A single feature flows through the Value Stream in what manner
A sequential manner
What are PI Objectives
A summary of the business and technical goals that an Agile Team or train intends to achieve in the upcoming PI.
How is "flow" represented on the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
A triple feedback loop, with value flowing to customers, while feedback and learning flow back to development to inform the decisions of what to build next.
What are the meeting names in which ART representatives come together regularly to assess progress towards the PI Objectives
ART syncs, Scrum of Scrums, and PO syncs.
What does 'A" represent in the CALMR DevOp approach?
AUTOMATION. The need to remove human intervention from as much of the pipeline as possible to reduce errors, shorten time to market and improve quality.
What are the responsibilities of the Business Owner during PI Execution
Actively participate in ongoing agreements to maintain business and development alignment as priorities and scope inevitably change, help validate the definition of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for Program Epics and guide the pivot-or-persevere decision based on delivery of the MVP, attend the System Demo to view progress and provide feedback, attend Agile Team Iteration Planning and Iteration Retrospective meetings, as appropriate, participate in Release Management, focusing on scope, quality, deployment options, release, and market considerations.
What does the Lean Portfolio Management competency provide to the organization?
Alignment of strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. These collaborations give the enterprise the ability to execute existing commitments reliably and to better enable innovation.
How does the Continuous Integration flow stage function?
All work is version controlled, and new functionality is built and continuously integrated into a full system or solution and tested end-to-end and then validated on a staging environment.
DevOps and Release on Demand is the responsibility of
All, it is a shared Responsibility
What kind of environment does the SAFe, Principle "Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers" create
An Environment of Mutual Influence.
What happens after a hypothesis is defined in the Continuous Exploration flow stage?
Architecture is articulated, and Features are defined and prioritized in the Program Backlog.
How does the Lean-Agile Leadership competency drive and sustain organizational changes?
By empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential. They do this by learning, exhibiting, teaching, and coaching SAFe's Lean-Agile Mindset, values, principles, and practices. The result is happier, more engaged employees, and increased productivity and innovation.
How does Lean-Agile Leadership support Built-in quality?
Demonstrate quality by refusing to accept or ship low-quality work. Support investments in capacity planning for maintenance and reduction of technical debt. Ensure that concerns of the entire organization—including UX, architecture, operations, security, compliance, and others—are part of the regular flow of work.
When teams commit to PI Objectives they agree to
Do everything in their power to meet the committed objectives, to escalate issues immediately that might prevent objectives from being met, and if it's discovered during the PI that some objectives are not achievable, then the teams agree to escalate immediately so that corrective action can be taken.
How frequently should the Team and Technical Agility construct delivery value?
Every 2-weeks or short periods of time
Business Value serves as an input to
Execution Considerations
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline for a Solution Train means that throughout every PI and every iteration in the PI, all will continuously:
Explore user value, build, integrate and demo value, deploy to production, and release value whenever the business needs it.
The RTEs major responsibilities are
Facilitates Program Level processes and execution, escalates impediments, manages risk, helps assure value delivery, drive program level continuous improvement and adapt SAFe to the organization, standardizing and documenting practices.
What does the Continuous Exploration flow stage represent?
Fostering of innovation and the creation of alignment on what needs to be built.
What are the Characteristics of for Decentralized Decisions
Frequent, Time-critical and Require local information.
What are the Lean-Agile Leadership Core Competency responsible for
Guiding the activities necessary to understand and continuously optimize the flow of value through the organization, organizing and reorganizing around value, identifying queues and excess Work in Process (WIP), continuously focusing on eliminating waste and delays, eliminating demotivating policies and procedures, inspiring and motivating others, creating a culture of relentless improvement that provides the space required for teams to innovate
What are the business benefits to Built in Quality
Higher customer satisfaction, Improved velocity and delivery predictability, Better system performance, Improved ability to innovate, scale, and meet compliance requirements?
What does the entire ART discuss in the Inspect and Adapt event
How to improve the process.
What are the benefits of Stretch Objectives
Improved economics, Increased reliability and enables adaptability to change
Teams on a train work on all dimensions of a Feature in what manner?
In parallel manner.
What is the cadence that teams work
In short two-week iterations and includes Iteration Planning, Iteration Execution
Lean Portfolio Management creates
Lean budget and investment guardrails and provides lean governance across value streams.
What are the behavior characteristics of an RTE?
Listen and support teams in problem identification and decision-making, create an environment of mutual influence, understand and empathize with others, encourage and support the personal development of each individual and the development of teams, persuade rather than use authority, think beyond day-to-day activities; Apply systems thinking, support the teams' commitments, and be open and appreciate openness in others.
What activities does the RTE role conduct
Manages and optimizes the flow of value through the program using various tools, such as the Program and Value Stream Kanbans and information radiators (Radiator Reports); establishes and communicates the annual calendars for Iterations and Program Increments (PI), Facilitate PI Planning readiness via fostering the preparation of Vision and Backlogs, and via Pre- and Post-PI Planning meetings, Facilitate PI planning, Aggregate Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives (the RTE) and publish them for visibility and transparency, Aggregate program PI objectives into Value Stream PI Objectives (the VSE) and publish them for visibility and transparency, Assist with execution and Feature/Capability completion tracking (see Metrics), Facilitate periodic synchronization meetings, including the ART sync at the Program Level and the VS sync at the value stream level, Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and the roll-up to the value stream level and Portfolio Level. Escalate and track impediments, Encourage the collaboration between teams and System and Solution Architects, Engineering, and User Experience, Work with Product Management, Product Owners, and other value stream stakeholders to help ensure strategy and execution alignment, Help manage risks and dependencies, and Report status to Program Portfolio Management and Release Management and support related activities.
How does Lean-Agile Leadership Support Program execution
Many leaders participate as Business Owners in PI execution and establish business value. All leaders help adjust the scope to assure demand matches capacity. They celebrate high-quality program increments. They aggressively remove impediments and demotivators.
What does Release on Demand allow the business to do?
Measure the outcome of its hypothesis and learn what it needs to do next based on the objective evidence of the customer response to the value released.
The objective of DevOps and Release on Demand is to
Optimize the flow of value
Business Value is assigned to
PI Objectives
What event does the ART collaborate on what it will build during the next Program Increment (PI).
PI Planning
What ceremony is the heart of the ART
PI Planning.
What Metrics are the Business Value used in
Program Predictability Measure,
What does the Program Predictability Measure provide as an indicator
Program performance and reliability
What are the benefits of PI Objectives
Provide a common language for communicating with business and technology stakeholders; Aligns the train with a shared mission; Creates the near-term vision, which teams can rally around and develop during the PI; Enables the ART to assess its performance and the business value achieved via the Program Predictability Measure; Communicates and highlights each team's contribution to business value; Exposes dependencies that require coordination.
What are the Business Owners responsibilities in Pre PI-Planning
Provide input to backlog refinement activities, participate in Pre-PI Planning as needed, Understand and help ensure that business objectives are comprehended and agreed to by key stakeholders of the train, including the Release Train Engineer (RTE), Product Management, and System Architects, and prepare to communicate the business context, including Milestones and significant external dependencies, such as those of Suppliers.
What are the responsibilities of the Business Owners during PI Planning?
Provide relevant elements of the business context in the defined PI planning agenda timebox, are ready and available to participate in key activities, including the presentation of vision, draft plan review, assigning business value to program PI objectives, and approving final plans, play a primary role in the draft plan review, understanding the bigger picture and how these plans, when taken together, do or do not fulfill the current business objectives, watch for significant external commitments and dependencies, actively circulate during planning, communicating business priorities to the teams, and maintaining agreement and alignment among the stakeholders regarding the key objectives of the train, participate in the management review and problem-solving meeting to review and adjust scope, and compromise as necessary.
What benefits do Business Owners and Teams obtain when assigning Business Value to objectives?
Provides an essential face-to-face dialogue, an opportunity to develop personal relationships, identify common concerns around which to gain mutual commitment, better understand business objectives and their value.
What does the Team and Technical Agility competency enable the organization to do
Provides the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that are needed to create high-performing Agile teams who produce high-quality, well designed technical solutions. The result is increased productivity, faster time-to-market, and predictable delivery of value.
What may have to be done In order to have realistic PI Objectives
Reduce WIP
What are the benefits of Decentralized decision-making
Reduces delays, improves product development flow and throughput, and facilitates faster feedback and more innovative solutions. Higher levels of empowerment are an additional, tangible benefit.
What does decreasing excess WIP do for the ART
Reduces overhead and thrashing, increases productivity and velocity, and provides a higher probability on delivery success.
What are some ways to reduce WIP to ensure realistic PI objectives
Reevaluate current, in-flight development work (WIP) with Business Owners or move lower-priority work items into the Program Backlog.
If any issues are identified with changes in Production what does Continuous Deployment allow the organization to do
Respond, rollback, or fix forward
The summarized PI objectives should be written in what format and include
SMART and have stretch objectives
Which roles does an RTE connect with
Scrum Masters, Product Managers, System Arch/Eng, Business Owner, Lean UX, Systems Team, Solution Roles
How do Stretch Objectives increase reliability
Stretch objectives represent variable scope, allowing confidence in the delivery of the main priorities. In turn, delivering commitments is the most important factor in building trust between the teams and the stakeholders (stretch objectives are not committed objectives).
RTEs collaborate to ensure strategy alignment with...
System Architect/Engineering and Product and Solution Management
The ART demonstrates the current working integrated system at the end of each iteration by conducting a
System Demo
What are additional responsibilities of Business Owners
System Demo Feedback - Participate and provide feedback from the Solution Demo regarding the capabilities and subsystem being built by the ART; Actively address impediments—especially those that escalate beyond the authority of the key stakeholders on the train; Participate in Pre- and Post-PI Planning for the Solution Train and assist in adjusting the ART's PI plans as needed; Participate, in some cases, in Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), Product Management, and System Architecture, and serve as an Epic Owner, where appropriate; Help drive investment in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline to improve the responsiveness and quality of the ART; Help break silos to align development and operations to create a DevOps culture of shared responsibilities; Serve as Epic Owners to guide major enterprise initiatives.
What are the three foundational bodies of knowledge that inform SAFe
Systems thinking, Agile development, and Lean product development.
What does the Continuous Deployment flow stage represent?
Takes the changes from the staging environment and deploys them to production.
Which SAFe construct applies Scrum, Kanban, and/or XP, Behavior Driven Development, and other Lean Agile principles and practices to deploy value?
Team and Technical Agility
Which SAFe construct is made up of cross-functional, empowered, collaborative, aligned on a common shared goal, and have all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and whenever applicable deploy value in short iterations?
Team and Technical Agility
What is the benefit of assigning Business Value
Team understanding the value allows them to deliver the maximum possible business benefit.
What does the DevOps and Release on Demand competency provide to the organization?
That a continuous delivery pipeline provides the enterprise with the capability to release value, in whole or in part, at any time necessary to meet market and customer demand. This enables the organization to lower development costs, reduce risk, and outmaneuver the competition.
ARTs are organized around releasing value on demand through...
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
Release Train Engineer
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.
What does the Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering competency provide to the organization?
The application of Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, and evolution of large, complex software applications and cyber-physical systems.
Continuous Deployment makes it possible for features to be in production and available to be released when
The business needs them.
What does the idea or hypothesis in the Continuous Exploration flow stage lead to?
The development of Minimal Viable Products (MVPs).
What do the SAFe Configurations represent?
The flow of Value.
What does Continuous Delivery Pipeline enable mapping and measuring of?
The flow of value from concept to cash, or from hypothesis to validation.
What does the Continuous Integration flow stage represent?
The process of integrating the ongoing work of the Agile Teams on the train into a staging environment.
ARTs optimize the flow of value through....
The program.
Business Value is not
calculated, it is assigned
ARTs conduct face-to-face planning for...
collaboration, alignment and adaptation.
What are the overall responsibilities of the Business Owners to an ART
They lead by establishing mission and Vision, help the teams with coaching and skill development, decentralize execution authority to the members of the ART, accountable for the growth of the organization and its people, operational excellence, and business outcomes, are Lean-Agile Leaders who share accountability for the value delivered, understanding of the Strategic Themes that influence the train, knowledgeable of the current Enterprise, Portfolio, and Value Stream context, involved in driving or reviewing the program vision and Roadmap, continuous involvement serves as an important Guardrail to the budgetary spend of the ART.
What is the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
This represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to provide a continuous release of value to the end user
What may the Innovation and Planning Iteration include?
Time for innovation and exploration, beyond the iterations dedicated to delivery, Work on technical infrastructure, tooling, and other impediments to delivery, Education to support continuous learning and improvement, Cross training to develop skills in new domains, languages, and systems, Dedicated time for the PI System Demo, I&A workshop, PI planning events, and backlog refinement, including final prioritization of Features using Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), Final integration of the solution, including verification and validation, if releasing on the PI boundary, Final user acceptance testing and documentation, and any other readiness activities that are not feasible or economical to perform at every iteration
How do Stretch Objectives allow for adaptability to change
To reliably deliver on a cadence, stretch objectives provide the capacity margin needed to meet commitments, yet alter priorities if necessary, when fact patterns change.
What do Stretch Objectives do and/or do not
Used to identify work that can be variable within the scope of a PI; They are not the way for stakeholders to load the teams with more work than they can do; It's not extra stuff to do, just in case time permits; If a team has low confidence in meeting a PI objective, it should consider categorizing it as a stretch objective; If an item has many unknowns, consider moving it to stretch, and plan spikes early in the PI to reduce uncertainty.
What is the purpose of PI Objectives
Validate understanding of the intent; Focus alignment on outcomes rather than process; Summarize data into meaningful and steerable information
What does "flow" represent on the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Value
DevOps and Release on Demand are organized around
Value Delivery
What activities are conducted when changes are deployed to production in the Continuous Deployment flow stage?
Verified and monitored to make sure they are working properly.
How does Lean-Agile Leadership support the Transparency Core Value
Visualize all relevant work. Take ownership and responsibility for errors and mistakes. Admit their missteps while supporting others who acknowledge and learn from theirs, and they never punish the messenger. Instead, they celebrate learning.
How does Continuous Exploration flow stage start?
With an idea or a hypothesis of something that will provide value to customers.
How do Stretch Objectives improve economics
Without stretch objectives, a team must commit to a 100 percent scope in a fixed timebox. This forces teams to trade off quality or build other buffers into the system. The other buffers can accumulate, and convert uncertain earliness to certain lateness, resulting in less overall throughput.
New RTE's will shift traditional managerial behaviors to a Servant Leadership from
coordinating team activities and contributions to coaching the teams to collaborate, from deadlines to objectives, from driving toward specific outcomes to being invested in the program's overall performance, from knowing the answer to asking the teams for the answer, directing to letting the teams self-organize and hit their stride and fixing problems to helping others fix them.
After the aggregate set of team objective become the committed ART plan, the RTE...
summarizes the team objectives into the program PI objectives in a format suitable for management communication.
If a team's vote on the confidence level is high enough the aggregate set of objectives becomes
the committed ART plan.
ARTs operate
with Vision, Architecture and UX guidance.
