SAFe Flashcards
Principles of Lean Thinking
- Precisely specify value by product
- Identify the value stream for each product
- Make value flow without interruptions
- Let the customer pull value from the producer
- Pursue perfection
7 core competencies of business agility
- Enterprise solution delivery
- Agile product delivery
- Teams and technical agility
- Lean portfolio management
- Organisational agility
- Continuous learning culture
- Lean-agile leadership
SAFe Core Values
- Transparency
- Alignment
- Relentless improvement
- Respect for people
SAFe Lean-Agile Principles
- Take an economic view
- Apply Systems thinking
- Assume variability, preserve options
- Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles*
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems*
- Make value flow without interruptions*
- Apply cadence, synchronise with cross-domain planning*
- Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
- Decentralise decision-making
- Organise around value*
Scrum Master / Team Coach duties
- Facilitates PI Planning
- Supports Interation Execution
- Improves Flow
- Builds a high-performing team
- Improves ART performance
Product owner duties
- Connects with customer
- Contributes to the vision and roadmap
- Manages and prioritises the Team Backlog
- Supports the team in Delivering Values
- Gets and applies Fast Feedback
SAFe Scrum benefits
- Great for new technology Solution teams
- Provides known methods for team alignment via scrum events
- Creates shared team commitment to timeboxed goals
SAFe Team Kanban benefits
- Great for new business Solutions teams
- Provides daily ability to react to changing demands
- Creates priority alignment and next to pull backlog
Agile Release Train (ART)
- A virtual organisation of 5-12 teams (50-125+ individuals)
- Synchronised on a common cadence, a Planning Interval (PI)
- Aligned to a common mission via a single ART Backlog
SM/TC responsibilities
- Facilitating PI Planning
- Supporting Interation Execution
- Improving Flow
- Building High-Performing Teams
- Improving ART performance
Agile Release Train (ART):
Continuous Delivery Pipeline
- Continuous Exploration (deliver value in line with business requirements, emphasizes understading the needs of the customer)
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Deployment
Release on Demand
Roles on the ART
- Release Train Engineer (RTE) (chief coach for the train)
- System Architect (provides architectural guidenace)
- Business Owner (Key stakeholders)
- Product Management (owns, defines and prioritises ART backlog)
- System team (provides processes and tools to integrate and evaluate assets early and often)
Reponsibilities of the ART
- Connecting with customer
- Planning the work
- Delivering value
- Getting Feedback
- Improving relentlessly
PO responsibilities
- Connecting with the customer
- Contributing to the value and roadmap
- Managing and Priortising the team backlog
- Supporting the Team in delivering value
- Getting and applying feedback
Design thinking
A customer-centic development process
- Problem Space > understand the problem
- Solution space > design the right solution
Leads to outcome which is:
* Desirable
* Viable
* Feasible
* Sustainable
Roadmaps
- Daily plan - 1 day
- Iteration plan - 1-2 weeks
- Current plan - 8-12 weeks
- PI roadmap - 1-3 PIs
- Solution roadmap - typically 1-3+ years
INVEST
User story
I - independant
N- negotiable
V- valuable
E- estimable
S- small
T - testable
Backlog refinement
- Helps the team turn new hypotheses into User Stories
- Allows teams to consider recent learning before Iteration Planning or in preparation for PI planning
- May occur daily throughout the interaction or at a longer event on a cadence
- Improves stories, adds acceptance criteria, and identifies missing information
- Leverages the teams collective knowledge and creativity
- Creates joint buy-in and ownership
Benefits of PI planning
- Establishes personal communication across all team members and stakeholders
- Aligns development of business goals with the business context, Vision and Team/ART PI objectives
- Identifies dependancies and fosters cross-team and cross-ART collaboration
- Provides opportunity for right amount of architecture and LEAN UX guidance
- Matches demand to capacity, eliminating excess work in process (WIP)
- Allows for faster decision-making
Acronyms
IP = Innovation & Planning
PI = Planning Interval
I&A = Inspect & Adapt
ART PI risk - ROAM
Resolved
Owned
Accepted
Mitigated
Final Plan Review Agenda
- Changes to capacity and load
- Final PI objectives and business value
- PI Risks and impediments
- Q&A session
CALMR approach to dev ops
How SAFe approaches devops
C - Culture
A - automation
L - Lean flow
M - measurement
R - recovery
Design thinking tools
- Gemba walks
- Personas
- Empathy maps
- Journey maps
- Story mapping
- Prototyping
Design thinking is sustainable
Agile software development quality practices
- Continuous integration
- Test-first practices
- Refactoring
- Continuous delivery
- Agile architecture
Basic Agile quality practices
- Establish flow
- Peer review and pairing
- Collective ownership and standards
- Automation
- Definition of done
Techniques to maintain customer focus
- Product roles as a proxy
- Gemba walks
- Empathy mapping
- Solution telemetry
- System demo
Team and technical agility
- Agile Teams - high performing, cross functional
- Teams of agile teams - build solutions > ART
- Built in Quality - quality business solutions delight customers
3 parts of I&A
- The PI system demo
- Quantitative and Qualitative measurement
- Problem-solving workshop
Competency improvement activities
- Retrospectives
- SAFe Assessments
- I&A
Eight Flow Accelerators
- Visualise and limit WIP
- Address bottlenecks
- Minimise handoffs and dependencies
- Get faster feedback
- Work in smaller batches
- Reduce queue lengths
- Optimise time ‘in the zone’
- Remediate legacy policies and practices
6 Flow metrics
- Flow distribution
- Flow velocity
- Flow time
- Flow load
- Flow efficiency
- Flow predictability
Agile Product delivery
- Customer centricity and design thinking- customer is center of your product strategy
- Develop on cadence and Release on demand- decouple the release of value from the development cadence
- DevOPs and the continuous delivery pipeline - continuously explore, integrate, deploy and release
SAFe Core Value: Alignment
- Communicate the vision, mission and strategy
- Connect strategy to execution
- Speak a common language
- Constantly check for understanding
- Understand your customer
SAFe Core value: Transparency
- Create a trust based environment
- Communicate directly, openly and honestly
- Turn mistakes into learning moments
- Visualise work
- Provide ready access to needed information
SAFe Core value: Respect for People
- Hold precious what it is to be human
- Value diversity of people and opinions
- Grow people through coaching and mentoring
- Embrace ‘Your customer is whoever consume your work’
- Build long-term partnership based on mutual benefits
SAFe Core Values: Relentless Improvement
- Create a constant sense of urgency
- Build a problem-solving culture
- Reflect and adapt frequently
- Let facts guide improvement
- Provide time and space for innovation
Four team topologies of ART
- Stream aligned teamed
- Complicated subsystem team
- Platform team
- Enabling team
Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
Number 4
PDCA:
Plan
Do
Check
Adjust
The interative learning cycle
Make value flow without interruptions
Instead of a large group working on all the requirements and integrating and delivering value toward the end of development haev small teams aligned together working on small batches of requirements and delivering value in short timeboxes with frequent integration and improvement cycles
Intentional architecture
Fosters team alignment and defines the Architectural Runway
Architectural Runway supports Vision execution
It is required for speed of development and maintainability
Emergent design
Teams grow the system design as User Stories require
It is required for speed of development and maintainability
4 types of Enabler stories
- Infrastructure
- Architecture (architectural runway)
- Exploration
- Compliance
3 C’s of writing good stories
Card
Conversation
Confirmation
Hierarchical Roadmap
- Solution roadmap - 1 to 3 yr
- PI Roadmap - 1 to 3 PI
- Current Plan - 8 to 12 weeks
- Interation Plan - 1 to 2 weeks
- Daily Plan - 1 day
Story point qualities
- Volume – How much is there?
- Complexity – How hard is it?
- Knowledge – What’s known?
- Uncertainty – What’s unknown?
System Demo
- Occurs at end of every interation
- Ideally next day
- Fact based measure of velocity and progress
- End of each PI there is a final PI system demo, which is larger in scope. Often part of I&A event
- Timebox to no more than 1 hour
Planning interval
- Cadence base timebox in which ART’s deliver continuous value to customers in alignment with PI objectives
- Typically 8-12 weeks long
- Usually pattern is 4 interations followed by 1 innovation and planning iteration
- Develop on cadence
- Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA)
- PI planning presents business context and vision, followed by team breakouts
- System demo at the end of every iteration
- Each PI ends with an I&A event
Coach sync
- Visibility into risks, dependencies progress and impediments
- Faciliated by RTE
- Participants - scrum masters / team coaches, select team members / SMEs
- Weekly or more frequently - 30-60mins
- TImeboxed and followed by a meet after
coach sync+po sync = ART sync
PO Sync
- Visibility into progress, scope and priorities
- Faciliated by RTE
- Participants - PM, PO, other stakeholders, SME
- Weekly or more frequently - 30-60mins
- TImeboxed followed by a meet after
coach sync+po sync = ART sync
SAFe Team Kanban
- Used within an ART to continuosly deliver value
- Apply a flow based process to daily work:
* Defining and visualising workflow
* Actively managing items in a workflow
* Improving a workflow
* Kanban board used to manage the workflow
SAFe Scrum
- Used within ART to deliver customer value in a short timebox
- Follow a regular cadence of events to achieve a common objective
- Iterations (Sprints - usually 2 weeks) are the heartbeat of Scrum and create a rhythm for work within the larger PI timebox
Iteration Planning > Iterations goals >(iteration backlog)>iteration review>iteration retrospective
4 types of enablers
- Exploration - customer needs, prospective solutions
- Architectural - used to build architectural railway
- Infrastructure - Creation and optimisation of development and run time environments
- Compliance - managing specfic compliance activities
Creating and managing enablers (3)
- Enabler Epics - ‘epic hypothesis format’. Can span multuple ARTs and PI’s
- Enabler features and capabilities - defined by ARTs and solution trains. Must be sized into a single PI
- Enabler stories - must fit within iterations