The map / ART
ART
End-to-end delivery and flow: a team of teams that turns Features into working product.
01What it's for
The Agile Release Train is a long-lived team of teams, organised around a value stream, that delivers end to end: from Feature to a working increment in the hands of customers.
Its teams plan together in PI Planning, integrate continuously and show the whole system working every four weeks. The ART is where flow is made or lost.
02What it turns into on the old system
The ART becomes a programme or a regrouping of the existing departments. Teams are organised per component or technology, work moves along a chain of hand-overs, the RTE acts as programme manager, and a coordination layer manages the dependencies the structure creates.
03How you notice
- The ART's boundaries follow the org chart, not the value stream.
- Most Features need other ARTs or departments to be finished.
- The programme board is full of red dependency strings.
- Release is someone else's job, on someone else's calendar.
04How to make it work
Design the ART around the value stream, so that most Features can be delivered within it.
Keep it stable and long-lived; bring the work to the ART, not people to the work.
Product Management owns the what and the why, the teams own the how. Measure flow (lead time, throughput, predictability) and the outcome of the Features.
→The parts of this level
- Feature — A benefit hypothesis one ART can deliver within a PI.
- Feature Refinement — Getting Features ready for PI Planning, just enough and just in time.
- PI Planning — All teams of the ART plan together, against the funded Feature backlog.
- ART Sync — Progress towards PI objectives, dependencies and impediments, every week.
- System Demo — The integrated increment of the whole ART, working, in front of the business.
- Inspect & Adapt — Review and retrospective of the whole ART, with numbers.
- Story map — The user journey laid out, and sliced into releases.
- MVP — The smallest thing that tests the Epic's hypothesis with real customers.
- Delivered increment — Working, integrated product in the hands of customers.