Learn what skills and qualities interviewers are looking for from a release train engineer, what questions you can expect, and how you should go about answering them.
The role of a release train engineer (RTE) is to manage and optimize the flow of work from development into production. In order to be successful in this role, you need to have a deep understanding of the software development process, the ability to effectively communicate with all members of the team, and a knack for troubleshooting and problem solving.
If you’re interviewing for a role as a release train engineer, you can expect to be asked a range of questions about your experience and expertise in the field. In this article, we’ll provide you with some tips on how to answer common interview questions, as well as a few sample questions and answers that you can use to help you prepare.
RTE Interview Questions and Answers
Are you comfortable working in a team environment?
Release train engineers often work in teams to ensure the success of their projects. Employers ask this question to make sure you’re a good fit for their company culture. In your answer, explain how you enjoy working with others and what makes it easy for you. Share an example of a time when you worked well with a team.
Example: “I love working in a team environment because I find it easier to get things done with other people. When I was working on my last project, we had a tight deadline that required us to all pitch in. We each took turns testing our code and giving feedback to one another. By working together, we were able to meet the deadline and create a successful product.”
What are some of the most important skills for a release train engineer to have?
This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. When answering, it can be helpful to mention a few of your strongest skills and how they relate to the job.
Example: “The most important skill for a release train engineer is communication. This role requires me to communicate with many different teams within my organization, including developers, quality assurance specialists and other engineers. I also need strong problem-solving skills because there are often issues that arise during the development process. Finally, I find that teamwork is an essential skill for this position since I work as part of a larger team.”
This question can help interviewers understand how you respond to challenges and react in emergency situations. In your answer, try to describe a specific situation where you handled a problem on the job and what steps you took to resolve it.
Example: “When I was working as a release train engineer for a large company, we were moving through our route when I noticed one of the cars had a small fire. We immediately stopped the train and called dispatch to report the issue. After waiting for backup, my team and I inspected the car and found that the fire was contained to one area. We then used a fire extinguisher to put out the flames and continued with our route.”
What is your experience with operating trains?
This question is an opportunity to show your interviewer that you have the skills and experience necessary for this role. If you don’t have any experience operating trains, consider talking about a similar job where you had to operate machinery or equipment.
Example: “I’ve been working as a release train engineer for five years now. I started out in a smaller company where I was responsible for releasing one product at a time. As my career progressed, I moved to a larger company where I was responsible for releasing multiple products at once. This taught me how to work with other engineers to ensure we all released our products on time.”
Provide an example of a time when you identified and resolved a problem with a train’s equipment.
This question can allow you to demonstrate your problem-solving skills and ability to work with a team. When answering this question, it can be helpful to describe the steps you took to identify the issue and how you resolved it.
If a train you were responsible for caused damage to another train, how would you handle it?
This question is a way for interviewers to assess your decision-making skills and how you would handle a challenging situation. In your answer, explain what steps you would take to ensure the safety of everyone involved in the incident.
Example: “If I was responsible for causing damage to another train, my first priority would be to make sure that no one was injured or killed as a result of the accident. Then, I would immediately contact emergency services so they could respond to the scene. Next, I would call my supervisor to let them know about the accident and ask them to send out a team to investigate the cause of the crash. Finally, I would remain at the site until all other trains were cleared from the tracks.”
- Manage & optimize the flow of value through mechanisms such as Program Kanban, Inspect & Adapt workshops and PI planning.
- Aggregate Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency.
SAFe Agile Interview Questions:
Qualities of a RTE (Release Train Engineer)
- Guide, coordinate, organize and align all the teams in the Agile Release Train.
- Participating in the Pre and Post PI Program Increment (PI) meetings to prepare the vision and the backlog for the PI.
- Conduct Planning session and aligning the PI objectives. Summarize the objectives so that they are clear and visible to all the teams in the Agile Release Train enhancing transparency.
- Communicating start and end dates of the Iterations communicated to the teams that become the part of the Agile Release Train.
- Operating within Lean-Budgets, and provide insight in economic matters to facilitate feature estimation.
- Frequently communicate with the other value stream stakeholders. The coordination with the Product Management and Product Owners ensure that the Agile Release Train adheres to the strategy that has been devised.
- Track impediments, perform risk and dependency analysis.
- Conducts Program Kanban, Inspect & Adapt workshops and PI Planning to maintain an optimum flow of value that the Agile Release Train has to deliver and improve the quality using Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
- Remove bottleneck situations by providing resources and facilitation.
- Facilitate system demos are set by the Release Train Engineer ensuring Lean-User Experience.
- Finally, as a chief scrum master, coach leaders, teams, and Scrum Masters in Lean-Agile practices and mindsets. At the end of the iteration, conducting Inspect and Adapt sessions where continuous improvement is encouraged. The status is reported to the Lean Portfolio Management.
RTE Interview Questions and Answers
The core responsibilities of the RTE are as follows:
- Manage & optimize the flow of value through mechanisms such as Program Kanban, Inspect & Adapt workshops and PI planning
- Aggregate Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency
- Encourage the collaboration between all the teams and Solution Architects, Engineering, and User Experience team, etc
- Work with Product Owners, Product Management and other value stream stakeholders to help ensure strategy and execution alignment
- Track impediments and help manage risks and dependencies
- As a chief scrum master, coach leaders, teams, and Scrum Masters in Lean-Agile practices and mindsets
Beginner Level Scaled Agile Framework Interview Questions
Q1. What is Agile? Explain Agile in 2 min.
This is a tricky and controversial question since the definition of agile is not commonly agreed upon. Is agile a framework? Is agile a methodology?
Agile is a mindset, a philosophy, more like a way of thinking, a movement focusing on communication, team-thinking, intrinsic motivation, empowerment, innovative walks, flow, and value creation while developing a product.
Q2. List some popular agile frameworks that you have used until now.
When you are posed with this sort of question, and if you haven’t used any frameworks, just name few that you might have heard of. Other frameworks that are based on agile are:
- Kanban
- Test-Driven Development
- Feature Driven Development
- Extreme programming
- Crystal
- Lean Software Development
Q3. What are some agile frameworks available for large-scale enterprise projects?
Few popular large-scale agile frameworks are:
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
- Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)
- Scrum at Scale
- Spotify Model
Q4. What is the Scaled Agile Framework?
Pioneered by Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an enterprise-scale development framework which uses a combination of existing lean and agile principles and combines them into a templated framework for large-scale projects. It is based on three primary bodies of knowledge:
Q5. What is the difference between Agile and SAFe Framework?
Agile is a mindset, a philosophy, more like a way of thinking, a set of principles for actions that keep a software development team organized and efficient. It is a broad term that covers a number of frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, etc.
On the contrary, SAFe is an acronym for the Scaled Agile Framework, which is an agile framework available for large-scale enterprise projects. It adds extra layers of communication and controls to allow people to use agile frameworks (like Scrum) with very large groups.
Q6. Name the four levels of the latest version of SAFe.
The latest version of SAFe has four levels, which are:
- Team Level
- Program Level
- Value Stream Level
- Portfolio Level
Q7. What are the different configurations of SAFe?
SAFe supports the full range of development environments with four various configurations, which are:
- Essential SAFe
- Large Solution SAFe
- Portfolio SAFe
- Full SAFe
Q8. Are the core values and principles in safe lean based or agile-based?
Scaled Agile Framework 9SAFe) is based on both Lean and Agile principles. SAFe supports four Core Values, which are:
- Alignment – It is necessary to keep up with rapid change & competitive forces
- Built-in quality – Ensures that every piece of the product reflects quality standards
- Transparency – To achieve best results transparency and trust within the organization is important
- Program Execution – SAFe places an intense focus on working systems and business outcomes
Q9. What is an Agile Release Train (ART)?
An Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived, self-organizing team of Agile Teams., which, along with other stakeholders, incrementally plans, develops and delivers a continuous flow of incremental releases of value in a Value Stream.
Q10. What is Program Increment (PI)?
A Program Increment is a timebox during which an Agile Release Train (ART) delivers incremental value in the form of the working, tested software and systems. Just like how you have an iteration for the agile team, there is a Program Increment for ARTs. PIs are usually 8-12 weeks long. Generally, PI is of four development iterations and one Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration.
Q11. Who is the Release Train Engineer?
Release Train Engineer, is a servant leader and the chief scrum master for the Agile Train. The RTE facilitates optimizing the flow of value through the program using various mechanisms, such as the Program Kanban, Inspect & Adapt workshops and PI planning.
Q12. What is Iteration Review in SAFe?
Iteration Review is a cadence-based event in which every team inspects the increment at the end of every iteration to assess progress, and then adjusts the team backlog based on the feedback received in the meeting. All the work that is done during the iteration reviewed during the iteration review meeting.
Q13. What is the difference between a Capability and a Feature?
A feature is a service provided by the system that addresses stakeholders requirements. Each feature has two core concepts – a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria. It is sized as necessary and made ready to be delivered by a single Agile Release Train (ART) in a Program Increment (PI).
Capabilities are similar to features, however, they describe higher-level solution behaviors and often take multiple ARTs to implement. They are sized and broken down into multiple features to aid their implementation in a single PI.
Q14. Apart from Scrum, which frameworks can be used at the team level?
Usually, Scrum is widely used at the team level but it is not the only practice that is being followed in SAFe. The teams in SAFe can use the agile framework which works best for their team and the delivery. They can opt for Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum or even Scrum with XP (ScrumXP).
Q15. Describe team Kanban. How are they different from other teams?
Team Kanban is a method that helps teams facilitate the flow of value by visualizing workflow, establishing WIP (Work In Process) limits measuring throughput, and continuously improving their process. They are used at Portfolio, Large Solution, Program and Team levels of SAFe.
Unlike other frameworks, Kanban is described as a pull system. Teams “pull” work when they know they have the capacity for it, rather than having scope being “pushed” on them.
Q16. What are Stories?
Stories are a short description of a small piece of the desired functionality and feature, written in the user’s language. They are primary artifacts used to define system behavior in Agile.
Q17. What is the difference between User Stories and Enabler Stories?
User Stories deliver functionality directly to the end-user, whereas enabler stories bring visibility to work items needed to support exploration, architecture, infrastructure, and compliance. Sometimes teams also need to develop technical functionality that is needed to implement a number of different user stories or support other components of the system. Those are enabler stories.
Intermediate Level Scaled Agile Framework Interview Questions
Q18. When to use the Scaled Agile Framework?
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) can be used when:
- The team is interested to implement an agile approach consistently across larger, multi-team programs and portfolios
- Multiple teams are already implementing Agile but regularly facing obstacles, delays, and failures
- Teams want to work independently and in a decentralized decison-making environment
- There is a need to scale Agile across the organization but not sure what new roles may be needed or what existing roles need to change and how
- An organization needs to improve its product development lead time and want to know how other companies have succeeded in scaling Agile with SAFe
Q19. Can you describe the four-tier hierarchy of artifacts that describe functional system behavior?
SAFe defines an artifact hierarchy of Epic, Capability, Feature, and Story.
- Stories are the primary artifacts, where each story provides a small, independent behavior that can be implemented incrementally and that provides some value to the user
- A feature is a service provided by the system that addresses stakeholders requirements. Each feature has two core concepts – a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria.
- Capabilities are similar to features, however, they describe higher-level solution behaviors and often take multiple ARTs to implement.
- Epics are defined at Portfolio Level and they are containers for significant initiatives that help guide value streams toward the larger aim of the portfolio. They are large and typically crosscutting, crossing multiple Value Streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
Q20. Explain what is a scrum of scrums.
This is one of the commonly asked scrum master interview questions. For example, let’s say there is an active project with seven teams working on it. The number of members of each team is also seven and are responsible to lead their own scrum meeting. But, in order to coordinate and communicate with different teams, they need to organize a separate scrum meeting. This meeting is called the scrum of scrums. The responsible person from each team attends the meeting and discuss their work and progress.
Q21. How is Essential SAFe different from Portfolio SAFe?
The Essential SAFe configuration is at the heart of the framework and is the simplest starting point for implementing SAFe. Though it is the initial level for organizations opting to implement SAFe, it consists of the most critical elements needed to recognize the majority of the framework’s benefits.
Talking about Portfolio SAFe, it helps to align portfolio execution to enterprise strategy and provides the basic constructs for organizing the Lean-Agile Enterprise around the flow of value.
Q22. What is the difference between Customers and Business Owners?
Customers are an integral part of Lean-Agile development and are the ultimate economic buyer of every solution. Whether internal or external they are increasingly demanding and they have choices. They want more value and they want their solution providers to continuously improve the quality of their products and services.
Business Owners are a critical group of three to five (3 – 5) stakeholders who have shared fiduciary, governance, efficacy, and ROI responsibility for the value delivered by a specific Agile Release Train (ART).
Q23. What is a Value Stream in SAFe?
A value stream is a long-lived series of steps used to deliver value, from customer order to delivery of a tangible result for the customer. The below illustrates the anatomy of a value stream.
An event triggers the flow of value, it could be a customer request or a new feature requirement. It ends when some value has been delivered like a shipment, customer purchase, or solution deployment. The activities in between are steps that enterprize uses to accomplish the task. So, basically, a value stream contains the people who do the work, the systems they develop or operate, and the flow of information and materials
Q24. Who are suppliers in SAFe? What do they do?
As you know the goal of Lean-Agile principles is to deliver value to their customers in the shortest possible lead time and with the highest possible quality. To achieve that they engage Suppliers to develop and deliver components and subsystems. These suppliers have unique and distinctively competent skills and are experts in their technology.
They play a key role in SAFe and can have a large impact on lead time and value delivery of the Enterprise’s Value Streams. To achieve the optimal results Suppliers become an extension of the culture and ethos of the enterprise, they are treated as a true partner.
Q25. What is the relationship between Value Stream and Agile Release Train (ART)?
| Value Stream | Agile Release Train (ART) |
| A Value Stream is a long-lived series of steps that provide a continuous flow of value to the customer | An Agile Release Train is a long-lived, self-organizing team of Agile Teams that delivers a continuous flow of incremental releases of value in a Value Stream. |
Q26. What is Architectural Runway in SAFe?
The Architectural Runway consists of the existing code, components and technical infrastructure necessary to support the implementation of prioritized, near-term features, without excessive redesign & delay. It supports the continuous flow of value, provides the necessary technical foundation for developing business initiatives and implementing new features.
Q27. What are the advantages of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
Advantages of using SAFe are as follows:
- Offers the opportunity to tap into a relatively lightweight framework that creates efficiency in software development while maintaining the centralized decision-making necessary at the enterprise level
- Helps teams maintain alignment with business goals and achieve greater transparency
- Helps cross-functional teams collaborate more effectively
- Highly suitable for large organizations
- Puts more emphasis on people over technology
Q28. How is the Continuous Delivery Pipeline associated with the Agile Release Train (ART)?
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline (sometimes just referred to as just ‘pipeline’) represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to develop a new piece of functionality all the way from ideation to an on-demand release of value to the end-user. The pipeline consists of four elements:
- Continuous Exploration (CE)
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Continuous Deployment (CD)
- Release on Demand
Q29. What is the final element of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline?
The final element of Continuous Delivery Pipeline is Release on Demand. It is the ability to make the value available to customers all at once or in an ad-hoc fashion, based on the needs of the market and the business.
Q30. What is the need for Solution Demo?
Solution demo is where the results of combined development efforts of multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) along with the contribution from Suppliers are shown to customers and other stakeholders. It is a very critical meeting for support train, an opportunity for objective evaluation and feedback. Also, a moment to celebrate and encourage team on their efforts of the latest PI.
Q31. What is the Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration in SAFe?
An important aspect of SAFe is continuous improvement. which is achieved through periodic Innovation and Planning sprints. IP iteration provides a regular, cadence-based opportunity for teams to work on activities that are difficult to fit into a continuous, incremental value delivery pattern. These may include:
- Time for innovation and exploring beyond the iterations dedicated to the delivery
- Working on technical infrastructure, tooling, and other impediments
- Education and awareness to support continuous learning and improvement
Q32. Is customer a part of Value Stream?
Yes, the customer is a part of Value Stream. Customers are of two types:
- Internal Customer can be from one of the departments within the organization requesting to build solutions around their requirements
- External customers are the ones who are the direct economic buyer of the solution
Customers support for Lean and Agile principles and their active and continuous participation in the Solution definition, planning, demonstrations, and evolution are essential to successful execution.
Q33. What are Epics?
Epics are defined at Portfolio Level and they are containers for significant initiatives that help guide value streams toward the larger aim of the portfolio. There are two types of epics: business epics and enabler epics, each of which may occur at the Portfolio, Large Solution, and Program Levels.
- Business epics directly deliver business value
- Enabler epics are used to evolve the Architectural Runway to support upcoming business epics
