Within the Agile Methodology, there are numerous ways to implement the methods into a product development team, such as Lean, KanBan, and Scrum. Most Agile CA teams ascribe to the Scrum framework, but recently there has been an internal push to switch to a new process, referred to as Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe. In the CA Islandia office, there was a two-day training seminar to educate various teams on how SAFe works, so that they might implement it. I had the opportunity to take part in the first day of training.
SAFe emphasizes the economics of development. It is different from Scrum in that it was created with larger organizations in mind. As CA is an international, Fortune 500 corporation, teams must coordinate across large physical and cultural barriers. Through tight iterations and a focus on cutting delays in releases, it aims to cut costs and deliver a more valuable product. With smaller, feature focused goals, any variability in the product design and customer feedback can be accounted for in a timely fashion. The really great thing about SAFe is it’s a whole company model, one where our finance, legal, marketing, support, and other teams can get involved in early on to change how we deliver higher quality software to our customers at a rapid cadence. It completely aligns to our Continuous Delivery strategy at CA Technologies and of course the products that we all work to build today in the DevOps business area. 
Though SAFe shares many principles with Scrum, it differs in the roles within a team, and the stages of development each team goes through. Rather than a team focusing on releases, it deals in product increments, or PIs. The PIs are scaled sprints that are internally demoed. Like Scrum, the team roles include Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developers/Testers. There are other roles that are different, such as the Release Train Engineer, Product Management, System Architect, System Team and Business Owners. These additional roles are an attempt to align business goals with development goals.
At the end of the first day of the training we participated in a sprint simulation in the style of a SAFe team. Each table in the conference room was a team, with a scrum master, product owner and developers. For the entire room, an executive, product manager, UX developer and RTE were assigned to brief the teams on expectations. Each team was responsible for an aspect of a fictional online book retailer. We had to organize stories that needed to be developed for our product feature based on our individual team capacity, story difficulty, and capacity of dependent teams, for two sprints.
Despite not having to actually develop anything, each team was engaged and excited to make sure they had their features designed while talking with the other teams to resolve dependencies up front. We learned how a complete product might be developed through the SAFe methodology and how closely aligned SAFe is to our continuous delivery and DevOps strategy.
Though the simulation was useful, it was performed inside of a bubble. The point of SAFe is that it should be scalable, thus applicable beyond the confines of a conference room. In order for SAFe to work, there has to be a push at the executive level to remove business constraints that contradict the methodology. I look forward to seeing how CA tackles this cultural shift and implements SAFe across multiple products.
After the course, I spoke with several of my fellow trainees. Jennifer Hajee, Senior Information Services Engineer CA Technologies, said “The SAFe training in Islandia gave me a good understanding of how SAFe is different from the Agile my scrum team is currently using. “People are more important than process” resonates with me.” Bridget Menzer, Engineering Project Manager, is excited to assume her role within the SAFe structure. Menzer explained that, “As a new Engineering Project Manager, I am eager to roll out these practices to my scrum teams. I have already adjusted my logistics of my sprints to adopt the SAFe practices and will complete the SAFe Agilist certification exam this week. Wish me luck!”
Did you attend the SAFe training? Are you familiar with SAFe or any similar Agile Methodologies? Sound off in the comments!