Hi,

Rob Pinna and I go way (and I mean way, way) back. I was interesed to see his perspective on the Scaled Agile Framework that he just published in a recent blog post. I thought he did a pretty good job of summarizing, but you can judge for yourself here.

Alex has been in town for the last few weeks, and we have been working hard on SAFe and the associated courseware. We started a week or so back by reviewing the product backlog item we call “UnSAFe holes”, i.e. places where we had weak, old, or inconsistent methodology, relative to our evolving, current understanding and related courseware. (Even as a toddler, our baby has some legacy code. Does yours?)

We were working at the Team Level, where we had some ...

Alex has been in town for the last few weeks and we’ve been working towards V2.5, with an eye towards a late summer release.  (We are co-teaching the next SPC cert class in Boulder next week as well.)

You can see some of the new BP 2.5 content published in the most recent posts of Value Stream, Business Owners, and Sprint Goals.

On our SAFe product backlog has been the need to change the ...

After a lot of discussion, we decided to just post the latest version of the SAFe foundations briefing for everyone’s use. In addition, yesterday we recorded a webinar, sponsored by our partners, where I delivered the new briefing to about 600 people. Both the slide deck and the webinar are posted here: scaledagileframework.com/foundations. Please note that the slide deck has certain restrictions on use, which are included in the presentation itself.

We’ve updated Epics, Business Epics and Architectural Epics to include the new Epic Value Statement format we’ve been using in the field. In addition, to help avoid the annoyance of having to manually create the Lightweight Business Case Template, we’ve included it in Word document form as a download at Epics as well.

With this addition, we have clarified the three recommended formats for system description (requirements) as follows:

User ...

 Agile Release Trains are virtual or solution-based organizations that simplify development, eliminate unnecessary handoffs and steps, and accelerate the delivery of value via implementation of Lean and Agile principles and practices. However, to date, SAFe has been quite on the topic of how you organize release trains within the enterprise.

In our SPC and SA trainings however, we always ...

Our colleague and SPC, Mark Richards from Australia has just concluded his case study of SAFe adoption at a large IT shop down under, now with Part 5: Conclusion. (for more on this and other case studies, check out Case Studies).

In Part 5, Mark summarizes some key findings, and most importantly publishes some quantitative results. After all, in the end, that’s all we really care about. In order not to ...

I’ll be guest hosting an upcoming free SAFe webinar “Accelerating Enterprise Agile Adoption with the Scaled Agile Framework^®” with VersionOne on May 13 at 12 noon EDT. I’ll provide a general overview of the features and benefits of the Scaled Agile Framework, and how you can apply it to accelerate value delivery in all of your most important value streams.

It’s actually a webinar in two parts. On Wednesday, May 22 at 12 noon EDT, VersionOne will be describing how their ...

Our colleague and SPC, Mark Richards from Australia has been continuing his excellent case study of SAFe adoption at a large IT shop, now with Part 4: In-play Work and the Program Level Feature Wall. (for more on this and other case studies, check out Case Studies).

In this post, Mark focuses on the practices they put in place to track features as they move through sprints and onto delivery.  He highlights what is essentially a logical, and always-current, extension of the ...

In Scrum, there are only two required artifacts that result from sprint planning: 1. the Sprint Backlog, representing the stories committed to the sprint, and 2. Sprint Goals.  However, we often observe that some teams don’t always apply sprint goals rigorously; perhaps they feel that committing to the stories is all the context and alignment they need. In the context of a single team or two, perhaps that is effective enough, even though it is not true scrum.

In the context ...