Introduction
SAFe® for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, practices, integrated principles, and competencies for Lean, DevOps, and Agile. Since 2011, hundreds of the world’s largest organizations have discovered its benefits: faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in more motivated and quality, and productivity and engaged employees. How does SAFe do this? SAFe lead together thought leadership from Agile development, Lean product development and systems thinking into a framework that provides a set of principles, guidance, and values for Lean-Agile development
The Scaled Agile Framework, is a set of workflow patterns intended and organization to guide enterprises in agile practices and scaling lean. Along with disciplined agile delivery (DAD), large-scale Scrum (LeSS), and Nexus, SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the issues encountered when scaling beyond a single team. SAFe is form freely available by Scaled Agile.
What’s left from Scrum and XP?
Scrum and XP is a lightweight process to deliver value for cross-functional, self-organized teams within SAFe. It mingles the power of Scrum project management practices with Extreme Programming (XP) practices. Scrum and XP detail the two essential characteristics of Team and Technical Agility, with Scrum providing guidance for XP and team agility for technical. Most Agile Teams use Scrum as their principal, team-based project management framework. A lightweight yet productive process and disciplined, Scrum allows cross-functional, self-organized teams to operate within the SAFe build. It prescribes three roles: Product Owner (PO), Scrum Master, and Development Team. The Scrum Master is a servant leader who helps the team stick to the rules of Scrum and works inside and outside of the team to remove limitation. The Product Owner is responsible for defining what gets develop. When extended by Extreme Programming (XP) engineering techniques, and Lean quality practices the Scrum and XP team provides the basic Agile building block for SAFe.
SAFe
The Scaled Agile Framework, developed by methodologist Dean Leffingwell, work a combination of existing lean and agile concept and combines them into a methodology for large-scale projects.
SAFe includes Team, Program, and Portfolio processes. At the Team level, the techniques outlined are those used in the scrum, recommending two-week sprint cycles. At the Program level, SAFe extends scrum by using the same concept but one level up. The Program level effort on a Release Train, which is composed of five sprint cycles. There’s also a sixth innovation planning sprint, which allows teams to innovate, inspect, and adapt. Roles and processes are clarified at the Program level, which allows for consistency and collaboration across the project. SAFe also provides processes one level higher, at the using lean principles, Portfolio level, such as optimizing value streams to help leaders identify and executives and features and prioritize epics that can be broken down at the scheduled and Program level on Release Trains.
LeSS
LeSS is Scrum—Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) isn’t new and improved Scrum. And it’s not Scrum at the bottom for each team, and something different layered on top. Rather, it’s about figuring out how to apply the principles, purpose, elements, and grace of Scrum in a large-scale context, as simply as possible. Like Scrum and other truly agile frameworks, LeSS is “hardly sufficient methodology” for high-impact reasons.
Scaled Scrum is not a special scaling framework that occur to include Scrum only at the team level. Truly Scrum scaled is scaled Scrum.
DaD
While scrum suppose a team is in flight, it does not include where the team started, or how to make “sprint zero” decisions, such as the base technology platform, the architecture, and the programming language. That’s where Disciplined Agile Delivery (DaD), Scott Ambler’s framework, begins, including the inception of the project, architecture and team formation, and the end – production, support, and operational use. Where “Scrum” tends to assume a team exists in maintenance mode, DaD does not, giving the team time to decide on the platform, build tools, the other challenges and project schedule that happen for maintenance efforts less and product development more.
Leading Agile
Since 2010, our mission has been to solve the real, underlying problems that block meaningful change in our clients’ organizations. We believe moving towards Agile is less about adopting practices and more about solving real-world business problems.
Most companies we work for focus on predictability, quality, early return on investment, cost savings, innovation, and product fit. We help them by developing a rational system of delivery that is built around teams, manages the flow of value, and balances capacity against demand. All other services we provide are always in the context of this delivery system.
Our secondary mission is to provide a freeform workplace environment that’s conducive to collaboration, a place where everyone knows their voice is valued. If you’re looking for a career opportunity where you can hone your skills and business acumen among some of the most intelligent, seasoned professionals in the industry and you think you have the grit and experience to deliver value to our clients, then welcome to Leading Agile.
Underlying principles of SAFe
According to its authors, SAFe is based upon nine underlying concepts, which are derived from existing lean and agile principles, as well as an observation:
- Take an economic view
- Apply systems thinking
- Assume division; preserve options
- Build step-by-step with quick, integrated learning cycles
- Base milestones on an objective analysis of working systems
- Visualize and limit work-in-development, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths
- Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
- Unlock the constitutional motivation of knowledge workers
- Decentralize decision-making
What’s next?
However, the ever-growing number of frameworks and the various opinions about them can be confusing, they demonstrate the adaptability that agile is known for Continuous evolution and debate, though frustrating for those who want final answers, lead to one thing that all agile methodologists agree on: the need to inspect and adapt. Experiences of those who use the frameworks, both positive and negative, help provide data for the next “version,” whether that be an improvement of a current framework or a new framework altogether.
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As a company comprised of individuals who have seen the vast number of improvements the Agile mindset can bring, It has become our resolute mission to bring Agile practices to every workplace the world over.
