SAFe has attracted a lot of attention. While its detractors claim it is mostly good marketing, it is actually because SAFe addresses many key issues in Agile at scale that are ignored by virtually all of the current popular approaches. This talk presents what one must attend to regardless of one’s approach. It then describes how these challenges are addressed in SAFe. Participants interested in scaled Agile in general or SAFe Agile in particular will find this talk of great value.
The talk discusses the following Agile at scale issues:
* Why using a foundation of Lean-Thinking is essential
* Why having explicit workflow and decision policies greatly increases learning
* Why you must build quality in with Acceptance Test-Driven Development
* Why it is important to delivery business incrementally
* Have architecture epics be a peer with business epics
* How to guide business value to be delivered in a hierarchy of portfolio, program, team and why this is necessary
* Taking a four step process to large scale implementation
1) Use a portfolio kanban system to limit work on the development teams
2) Create cross-functional teams to the extent appropriate while organizing these teams so that they can work together
3) Adopt the appropriate work flow that includes test-first at at least the acceptance level and provides a common cadence of all teams to enable continuous integration
4) Use kanban to manage WIP at the front of the value stream
* Have an owner for the development value stream
