The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is quickly being adopted by many large organizations that have had some success with agile at the team level but have not been able to scale up to large projects. Al Shalloway describes what SAFe is, discusses when and how to implement it, and provides a few extensions to SAFe. Al begins with a high-level, executive’s guide to SAFe that you can share with your organization’s leaders. He then covers the aspects of implementing SAFe: identifying the sequence of features to work, establishing release trains, the SAFe release planning event, SAFe’s variant of Scrum, and when to use the SAFe process. Al concludes with extensions to SAFe including creating effective teams—even when it doesn’t look possible—and implementing shared services and DevOps in SAFe using kanban. Get an introduction to SAFe, discover whether it would be useful to your organization, and identify the steps you should take to be SAFe.
Al Shalloway
With more than forty years of experience, the founder and CEO of Net Objectives Al Shalloway is an industry thought leader in lean, SAFe, kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum, and agile design. Al helps companies transition enterprise-wide to lean and agile methods, and teaches courses in these areas—one of a handful of SAFe SPC trainers. He is the primary author of Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, Design Patterns Explained, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, and Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Cofounder (although no longer affiliated) with Lean Kanban University, Al is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide.
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focusing on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you could otherwise get from lean. Al Shalloway describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Al explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Lean principles include optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, implementing pull, managing work in process, and cross-functional teams. Al will describe how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.
The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging conundrum. Too much design often results in excess complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in a poor architecture or insufficient system structures which require expensive rework and hurt more in the long run. So, how can we know the right balance of upfront design work and emerging design approaches? Al Shalloway shows how to use design patterns—coupled with agile’s attitude of “don’t build what you don’t need”—to guide your design efforts. The trick is to identify potential design alternatives, analyze how each may affect the system in the future, and then find the simplest approach for isolating those potential effects. Al describes the essence of emergent design—start with a simple design and let it evolve as the requirements evolve—and demonstrates how to refactor to achieve better designs, which really is quite different from merely refactoring bad code.