Imagine a world of work in which we no longer fight about agile or not agile, Scrum or not Scrum, Kanban or not Kanban.

Imagine a team that continuously adds value while providing the needed information for the business to have the company thrive.

Imagine what would be possible in such a world, and what would stop working.

I think at the heart of agile software development once stood this imagination, resulting in all the different things we see in the agile cosmos today.

Unfortunately, this imagination sort of has been replaced by all the discussions we have around this vs. that. To maybe bring back these initial driving thoughts, I send you off to the weekend with your own imagination, hoping that you will bring back that agile essence next week.

A couple of years back, while I was involved in a group that eventually created the ScALeD principles, we were of course discussing the benefits of the different scaling approaches out there. One of the participants – I think it was Andreas Schliep – mentioned to me that the release train concept in the scaling approach that Mike Beedle always referred to as S_Fe was pretty clever. Since I spent some amount of time on trains in the past twelve years, I tend to disagree. Let’s see how I perceive the release train metaphor based on my experiences in the German train infrastructure.

I recall when I read the #noestimates book, there was a concept that felt strange to me – and it still does. Without spoiling too much, at one point the concept of running, tested feature (RTF) is introduced. Let’s explore my thoughts together.