Dean Leffingwell released the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) in 2012 as a publicly available framework for implementing Lean and Agile practices at the enterprise scale. Agile methods are widely applied in software development at the team level. SAFe defines how to take Agile principles above team level into the program and portfolio level, aligning all layers of the enterprise to efficiently contribute to the value stream.
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The main objective of SAFe is to build high quality software products and to deliver value to business and customer alike. The Scaled Agile Framework promises to bring greater customer satisfaction at lower cost while improving employee satisfaction at the same time – and doing all this at scale. The SAFe concept integrates great software engineering practices (like XP – extreme programming) and project/process management best practices (Lean, Scrum and Kanban) in order to ensure that quality remains the key objective.
Across several SAFe implementation projects by Dean Leffingwell there are already indicators that describe the main benefits that can be achieved using this framework.
Jacob Creech, a SAFe program consultant shared a similar list of the main benefits of SAFe:
- Alignment – helping everyone have the same understanding of the project they are working on;
- High Quality Software – using technical best practices to give better user experience and reduce waste and delays,
- Delivering More Value Sooner – getting value to users faster.
It is sure that further improvements to SAFe, and other emerging models for scaling Agility will be published in the future, but SAFe is already a good and complex model that provides a good basis to start scaling Agile in an enterprise setting. Scrum is ideal for teams, but SAFe addresses the problems we face as we scale our Scrum process from one team to multiple teams.
As an Agile ALM tool, codeBeamer covers SAFe's Team, Portfolio, Program, and optional Value Stream levels, adequately supporting the implementation of SAFe. Request a trial of Intland’s SAFe® Template, or download codeBeamer ALM's trial version right away!
SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile Inc.
