Leading SAFe 5.0 Flashcards
What is meant by Lean-Agile principle “Take an economic view”
- Sequence for maximum benefit
- Work on the highest value work that can be completed in the shortest time
- Ignore sunk costs
- Make economic choices continuously
- Balance costs vs value delivered
- Empower local decision making
- If you quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay
- Why??
What values and principles make up the Continuous Learning Culture competency?
Encouraging individuals, and the Organization as a whole, to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation.
What is the purpose of the Program Backlog?
It is a holding area for upcoming features that will address customer needs and deliver business benefits for a single ART
What should ARTs be designed around?
- The Flow of Value
- Synchronization is the key to value flow
- Synchronization must be on a common cadence across all Agile teams
- An ART has a SINGLE program backlog
What are the responsibilities of an Agile team?
- Create and refine User Stories and acceptance criteria
- Define, build, test, and deliver stories
- Develop and commit to team PI objectives and Iteration plans
- Typically 5-11 members
List the first 6 principles of the Agile Manifesto.
- Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable solutions.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s advantage.
- Deliver working solutions frequently.
- Business people and developers must work together on a daily basis.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment they need and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a team is face-to-face conversation.
Lean-thinking people and Agile teams are supported by what 3 documents?
- House of Lean 2. SAFe Principles 3. Agile Manifesto
How can you live the Program Execution core value?
- Participate as an active business owner in PI execution 2. Celebrate high quality and predictably delivered PIs 3. Aggressively remove impediments and demotivators
What are PI Objectives and their purpose?
- Objectives align the teams to the mission/vision of the Program
- Objectives are business summaries of what each team intends to deliver in the PI
- They often map directly to Features in the backlog
- They are written in Business Langauge
- They are defined by the team and flow up
- They NEVER have just one or two words
- They ALWAYS include nouns and verbs
Do you need to start with Essential SAFe before implementing other SAFe levels? Why or Why Not?
No. Any level of SAFe can be implemented. Most successful implementations, however, start with Essential SAFe as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
What are the 6 elements of the House of Lean?
- Leadership is the foundation 2. Flow is a pillar 3. Respect for people and culture is a pillar 4. Innovation is a pillar 5. Relentless Improvement is a pillar 6. Value is the roof. The foundation and pillars support the delivery of value.
What are the attibutes of Systems Thinking?
The solution and the enterprise are both affected by:
- Optimizing a component does not optimize the system
- For the system to behave well as a system, a higher-level understanding of behavior and architecture is required
- The value of a system passes through its interconnections
- A system can evolve no faster than the slowest point of integration
Why Story Points?
- Humans are very poor at estimating absolute measures
- We are hard-wired for comparative estimating
- Points are abstract and which helps with the comparisons
What must a Program Backlog have to align everyone?
A clear Vision that:
- Describes the future state of the product
- How it will solve customer problems
- The features
- How it differentiates (not as useful for USI)
- The NFRs that it delivers
What is meant by “Built-in Quality”?
- Ensures that every increment of the solution reflects quality standards
- Is required for high, sustainable development velocity
- Many practices apply to every team
- Establish flow
- Peer review and pairing
- Collective ownership and standards
- Automation
- Definition of done
YOU CAN’T SCALE CRAPPY CODE (OR HARDWARE, OR ANYTHING ELSE)
List the 2nd 6 principles of the Agile Mainifesto
- Working solutions is the primary measure of progress
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
- Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential
- The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Why do Integration Points control product development?
- Integration points accelerate important learning through implementation of the PDAC cycle in each iteration.
- Development cannot proceed any faster than the slowest integration point.
- Improvement comes through synchronization of design loops and faster learning cycles.
Each level is an integration point – Team, ART, Value Stream or Enterprise
Business Agility requires ___________ and a business-level commitment to _________ and ________ ________ thinking.
- technical 2. product 3. value stream
What are the 3 dimensions of the Enterprise Solution Delivery competency?
- Lean systems and solution engineering 2. Coordinating Trains and Suppliers 3. Continually Evolve Live Systems
What are the 3 dimensions of the Organizational Agility competency?
- Lean-thinking people and Agile teams 2. Lean business operations 3. Strategy Agility
Why base Milestones on objective evaluation of working systems?
At each milestone we are eliminating options based on feedback/data. In order to get that feedback/data you must have a working system.
What is the goal of the Lean-Agile Leadership competency?
The goal is to drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.
An Innovation Culture has what attributes?
- Innovative people 2. Time and space 3. A Go See mindset 4. Experimentation & feedback mindset 5. Pivot without guilt or mercy 6. Innovation riptides
What 3 elements support the Strategy and investment funding dimension of Lean Portfolio Mgmt?
- Enterprise executives 2. Business Owners 3. Enterprise architects
Why is Customer Centricity a mindset?
Whenever a customer-centric Enterprise makes a decision, it fully considers the effect it will have on its end users.
What are NFRs?
Non-functional Requirements
- Quality standards
- Response times
- Technology requirements (e.g. use Oracle DBs)
What are the responsibilities of the Product Owner
- Defines and accepts Stories
- Acts as the Customer for developer questions
- Works with Product Mgmt to plan PIs
- Be ready to roll up sleeves and write stories (epics, features, user)
- Support pushing decision making down
SAFe for Lean Enterprises is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for achieving __________ _______ by implementing ______, ______, and ________ at scaled
- Lean 2. Agile 3. DevOps
What are the 3 dimensions of the Continuous Learning Culture competency?
- A learning organization 2. Relentless improvement 3. Innovation culture
What is the fastest way to reduce “time to market”?
Reduce delays in the system
What are the 3 dimensions of Lean Portfolio Mgmt?
- Strategy and investment funding 2. Lean governance 3. Agile portfolio operations
Whare are the responsibilities of the Scrum Master?
- Coaches the agile teams and facilitates team meetings
- Removes impediments and protects the team from outside influence
- Attends Scrum of Scrum meetings
- Makes sure User Stories are done and have good acceptance criteria
- Makes sure the team doesn’t burn out
What is the Team and Technical Agility competency?
Describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles that high-performing Agile teams use to create high quality solutions for their customers.
What are the 4 things of value in the Agile Manifesto?
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working solutions over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiations 4. Responding to change over following a plan
What are the 7 SAFe Core Competencies?
- Enterprise Solution Delivery 2. Agile Product Delivery 3. Team and Technical Agility 4. Lean Portfolio Mgmt 5. Organizational Agility 6. Continuous Learning Culture 7. Lean-Agile Leadership
What 3 elements support the Agile Portfolio Operations dimension of Lean Portfolio Mgmt?
- Agile PMO 2. LACE 3. RTE and SM CoP
Which individuals should be at PI Planning sessions?
- Executives to set the program vision
- Usually just a few slides
- Product Mgmt
- Defines the How of achieving the work
- Agile Teams
- Architects/engineering
- What structural foundations are needed
- What debt can we pay down
How many SAFe Core Values exist? Name them.
There are 4. 1. Alignment 2. Transparency 3. Built-in Quality 4. Program Execution.
What is the goal of the Organizational Agility competency?
Optimizing business processes and evolving strategy, and to quickly adapt to capitalize on new opportunities.
What is a Feature?
- They represent the work of the ART
- They have a Benefits Hypothesis
- They have Acceptance Criteria
- They include functional and nonfunctional requirements
- They fit within 1 PI
- 10 week Features are NOT the norm