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Release Train Engineer Responsibilities

Release Train Engineer Responsibilities

“The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). The RTE’s major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement.” – Scaled Agile Framework definition

The specific responsibilities are:
Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART using various tools, such as the Program Kanban and other information radiators
Establish and communicate 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 the PI planning event
Aggregate Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency will get the info and put it in one place.
Assist with execution and Feature/Capability completion tracking via program metrics
Facilitate periodic synchronization meetings, including the ART sync at the Program Level
Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and the roll-up to epics, where necessary
Coach leaders, teams, and Scrum Masters in Lean-Agile practices and mindsets
Help manage risks and dependencies via PI Planning
Escalate and track impediments
Provide input on resourcing to address critical bottlenecks
Encourage the collaboration between teams and System Architects/Engineering.
Work with Product Management, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to help ensure strategy and execution alignment
Improve the flow of value through value streams using the Continuous Delivery Pipeline and DevOps
Help drive the Lean UX innovation cycle
Report status to Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and support related activities via information radiators
Understand and operate within Lean Budgets
Facilitate System Demos
Drive relentless improvement via Inspect and Adapt workshops; assess the agility level of the ART/Solution Train and help improve
Foster Communities of Practice and the use of engineering and Built-In Quality Practices
Ensures PI Planning success by helping Product Management hold meetings to identify, size and prioritize initiatives, epics and features for the upcoming PI
Ensures that Product Management works with the teams to understand the work requested for the upcoming PI
Ensures that development teams work with general service teams such as UX, internationalization, tech writing, devops, release management, system team and others to coordinate work and timelines for the upcoming PI
Ensures that all Pre-PI Planning activities, events and artifacts are completed on time by working with Product Management, Technical Leadership and teams to develop, monitor and drive milestones.