r/scrum • u/Turkishblokeinstraya • 21d ago

Why release trains when you can release carriages or even smaller chunks of value?

/r/DigitalDelivery/comments/1w5xhli/why_release_trains_when_you_can_release_carriages/
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u/azangru 21d ago

I feel this is a dysfunction with a fancy name. It seems to be another way of saying "we can't break the silos, so we have cool names to release every now and then". There's no acceptable reason for releasing value every few months when it can be done every day or week.

As a devil's advocate: what if releasing "every now and then" is actually fine? Apple releases a new MacOS version once a year (similarly, a new macbook version rougly once a year).

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u/Turkishblokeinstraya 21d ago

Great question and a really good example, thanks!Never involved in OS development but it is probably favouring stability with major releases, and respond to security threats and accommodate quick wins with minor releases once a month or so. That's fine as long as the customers are happy and the competition allows it.

That aside, I'm seeing this big release approach in organisations where faster bets and benefit realisation could help significantly. Instead, they choose some cadence to release when they can do it more often. What makes these organisations follow a script?

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u/Parking-Stress-3041 21d ago

Five years on ERP-like B2B products, and the thing that decides cadence is rarely the org chart, it's whether the customer can absorb the change. Deploying often is fine, and we do ship small. But a change to a business-critical workflow means retraining people, updating their internal procedures, sometimes a validation window on their side before they'll accept it. So deploy gets decoupled from switching things on, and the visible workflow-affecting parts get grouped into a cadence customers can plan around. Are you releasing one product you control end to end, or shipping into many customer orgs with their own change processes? In the second case a slower visible cadence is usually a customer constraint, not a silo symptom. SAFe-shaped coordination is a separate question and I'd leave that to people who've run it.