An understanding of Scaled Agile Framework

SaFe has been designed by Dean Leffingwell and his team. The purpose of SaFe is to scale the agile value from a high performing Scrum, XP and Kanban practicing team to a system and an enterprise level in an effective synchronized way.

Portfolio:

Enterprise: Enterprise represents business having portfolios driven by strategic themes as business driver.

Portfolio Management: Portfolio management owns the responsibility of strategy, program management and governance of a specific portfolio driven by decentralized decision making, continuous value flow, epic and rolling wave planning.

Epic owner: Epic owner is responsible for a portfolio level epic starting from its business case stage to approval to value stream implementation. Epic owner collaborates with multiple stakeholders.

Enterprise Architect: Enterprise architect collaborates with business stakeholders and solution architects to drive a holistic technology implementation across the portfolio value stream.

Kanban & Backlog: Portfolio management kanban addresses the flow of epic that affects value streams & agile release trains. Portfolio backlog is the highest level backlog in a portfolio.

Epic & Enablers: Epic holds the economic value of enterprise. Enablers are the technical initiative supporting business value creation at portfolio level.

Budget & Value Streams: Budget is the approved operational cost in terms of CAPEX & OPEX. Value streams are long lived systems delivering continuous value flow to customer of the enterprise.

Program:

PI Planning: Program increment planning is a 2 days release planning meeting at program level attended by agile teams, product management, architects, system team and other stakeholder. PI planning delivers a program level backlog.

ART & RTE: Agile release train is the team of agile teams that plans, commits and executes together. Release train engineer is the scrum master of the agile release train.

Business owner & Product Management: Business owners are responsible for ROI of the value delivered by a release train. Product management creates program vision and it is responsible for managing a program level backlog.

Architecture Runway: Architecture runway is a planned architecture initiative that enhances solution design, performance, cross team design and implementation. It supports emergent design of the agile team.

DevOps, Release Management, Shared Services, System Team, User Experience: These are the essential support systems enabling agile release train to deliver continuous flow of values.

Backlog, PI Objective & System Demo: Program backlog is upcoming feature and enablers. PI objectives are summarized goal that an agile release train intends to achieve. System demo is the integrated & aggregated view of the new features that an agile release train has built.

Feature & Enablers: Feature is the required system functional definition which delivers benefit. Enablers are technical initiative to support the development business initiatives.

Release any time: Release multiple times during an ART flow depending on development & business context.

Iteration:

Agile Team, Product owner, Scrum Master: Product owner is the owner of sprint backlog collaborates with program product manager and agile team. Scrum master facilitates the agile team and coordinates with other team of the agile train. Agile team is a self – managed team which turns the committed backlog into shippable value for the customer or works on a technical initiative.

XP Scrum & Kanban: XP scrum is a 2-3 week scrum iteration. Team kanban facilitates the agile team in delivering a flow of values through a workflow visualization.

Backlog & PI Objectives: Backlog is the team level prioritized backlog. PI objective is a team level business and technical goal summary.

Iteration planning, execution, demo and retrospective: Iteration planning is the sprint planning where team commits the backlog for an iteration and decomposes the committed backlog into sequenced tasks. Iteration execution is the execution of the committed task using daily scrum and Kanban board. Demo is the team level demo and retrospective is the team retrospective on the processes used in iteration.

Built-in quality: Built -in quality is an ongoing commitment & training on innovative lean-agile methods.