What is SAFe®?

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a body of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile principles at an exponential scale. The framework is a knowledge base that provides systematic direction on tasks and duties, how to organize and manage work, and principles to uphold in an organization.

SAFe® assists businesses in bringing their personnel, procedures, and technology into alignment to meet company objectives and provide customer value. And as a unique element, the framework can be tailored to suit any organization's demands.

Furthermore, several sectors, including software, hardware, systems engineering, and others, have demonstrated the effectiveness of SAFe®. Without a doubt, the implementation of SAFe® is the perfect bridge to link organizations to an increase in their agility, quality, predictability, and profitability.

The SAFe framework is founded on a tripod of knowledge:

• Systems thinking
• Lean product development
• Agile software development.

These three are aimed to assist enterprises in delivering value more effectively by fostering alignment and collaboration among numerous agile teams. While implementing SAFe has numerous advantages, some of the most noteworthy ones include enhanced communication, greater transparency, and improved productivity. Without fail, businesses will improve their capacity to offer value and accomplish their objectives by adhering to the SAFe framework.

SAFe: The New Industry Standard

To assist enterprises in creating better systems and software that better suits the evolving demands of consumers, Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo developed SAFe in 2011. Teams delivered software at the time using conventional project management procedures. Consequently, organizations could overcome the drawbacks of these traditional methods, which frequently caused projects to be delayed or over budget. But to make things much more efficient and faster, SAFe was created.

Since its introduction, SAFe has been embraced by businesses of all sizes and sectors. The tenet of SAFe is to ensure that organizations are flexible enough to compete in today's rapidly evolving market and react quickly to changes in customer demand. To achieve this, SAFe recommends a set of guidelines and procedures that allow businesses to create and roll out goods and services more rapidly and effectively.

Additionally, it assists companies in effectively integrating their development objectives with their corporate goals. SAFe has thus emerged as the industry standard for delivering agile software at scale.

How Does SAFe Work?

The core values of SAFe define the culture that any management must establish and the behaviors that members of that culture should exhibit to execute its framework fully. The four guiding principles are:

• Respect
• Collaboration
• Learning
• Safety

Respect: Respect is a concept SAFe emphasizes to ensure everyone feels valued for their unique contributions. For SAFe to operate effectively, all four of these variables must exist.

Safety: SAFe places high importance on safety, ensuring everyone feels free to try new things and take calculated risks.

Learning: Alongside safety, SAFe prioritizes education and ensures everyone is comfortable making errors and learning from them.

Collaboration: As far as collaborations go, SAFe places high importance on them and has practicable structures to see that everyone is comfortable working together.

How Does SAFe Compare to Other Scaled Agile Frameworks?

Synchronization at all Levels: SAFe makes it possible for organizations to establish planning and reflection cadences at all organizational levels, so everyone is aware of the company's current situation, and all personnel can work together to meet those objectives. By that, people and activities are consistently synchronized at all portfolio levels.

Optimum Organizational Communication Flow:  Information tends to only move downhill from management to employees in a typical top-down organization. This might lead to several issues:

1. It could result in a breakdown in communication and transparency.
2. It could make workers feel isolated like their opinions aren't being heard.
3. It may result in decisions being made without the involvement of the people they will impact.

SAFe ensures that information is made to flow both upward and downward, so every personnel is notified of changes in real-time and can plot a corresponding correction path. This keeps everyone working toward the same objective and prevents silos from developing.

Inclusion: A more modern strategy allows information to flow upward and downward. This promotes a more welcoming and inclusive workplace where everyone feels that their opinions are heard. Additionally, it aids in ensuring that views from all organizational levels are considered when making choices. As a result, an organization's overall effectiveness may be enhanced through a more timely and effective flow of information.

As a result, cadences are a crucial component of SAFe and contribute significantly to its success. These cadences ensure that business goals are accomplished, and advancement is achieved. Without them, monitoring the development or making required corrections would be challenging.

How Does SAFe Serve Software Engineering?

Some call SAFe a collection of best practices and guiding principles, and rightly so. This is especially true because it was created to assist businesses in scaling agile methodology across big corporations. SAFe is available in four different configurations to support varying organizational scales:

Essential SAFe: This is the most basic version of SAFe, and it's for small to medium organizations.

Large Solution SAFe: Large Solution SAFe was developed for enterprises that must scale agile across several teams working on huge solutions.

Portfolio SAFe: Organizations that need to coordinate several agile efforts at the portfolio level utilize Portfolio SAFe.

Full SAFe: The most extensive configuration, known as Full SAFe, best suits huge businesses.

The roles, responsibilities, and process flow specific to each configuration must be understood and adhered to.

Challenges

Managing projects and ensuring everyone is on the same page is a considerable challenge when working with a big development team. Frustration and delays in the development process may result from this.

Any software creation project will crumble without a solid and cohesive development team. This team must have people with various skill sets who can collaborate to produce a high-quality product. The team comprises software developers, technical architects, business strategists, and documentation specialists. Furthermore, a project manager or lead engineer who would lead the development process would be needed.

David Jeske, former Google Engineering Director, argues that while some agile principles work well, they only work for some types of software engineering and fall into others. For example, in his experience, the agile methodology works well with software with a simple core and yet not so well for software that isn't usable until the final stages. 

"Projects like Bigtable and Borg are the anti-scrum. They represent extremely long-term thinking on the part of the technical leaders. Instead of working on something that would meet a small need this week, they were laying a foundation for a fundamental shift in the way cluster software was developed." - David Jeske, former Google Engineering Director.

SAFe's Solutions

Total Commitment:

SAFe's framework shows possible ways of ensuring that every team member working on a software development project is committed to the project. This is perhaps the most critical and non-technical part of the development process.

Motivation:

Commitment is essential, but not to the point where developers are overworked and put in unnecessarily long hours; that is where motivation comes in. The deadlines and expected times of arrival (ETA) should be reasonable yet feasible. Similarly, team members may get frustrated and disillusioned if deadlines are frequently missed or ETAs are too unrealistic, which might ultimately sabotage the project.

If by following SAFe, agile practices, team members are allowed enough latitude to do their job without being overly rushed. In that case, it will result in a more productive and happy working atmosphere, eventually benefiting the project as a whole.

Quality Development Practices:

Agility and high-quality Software Development are equally valued under the SAFe framework. Using five critical dimensions—flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality—SAFe integrates quality into every job and project. As a result, teams are never forced to compromise quality for speed or vice versa. All teams will be able to produce high-quality software products thanks to SAFe, which ensures this by including quality development practices in every working agreement.

Conclusion

Time is of the essence, as anybody who has ever managed a project can attest. A project may go over budget if a job is performed faster than anticipated. Striking a balance is essential to ensuring a project's success because too much and too little time might cause issues.

Project managers may avoid costly mistakes and ensure their projects' practical completion by investing the time to plan and monitor progress. On the other hand, if a task meant to be accomplished in a few hours is still incomplete after a few weeks, it may result in an underfunded project. In any scenario, managing your time to prevent future issues is critical.