SAFe 6.0 Review Flashcards
What is Business Agility?
- The ability to compete and thrive
- by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities
- with innovative and digitally enabled business solutions
What are the 7 Core Competencies in Agile Delivery?
Organizational Agility
Enterprise Solution Delivery
Agile Product Delivery
Team & Technical Agility
Lean Agile Leadership
Continuing Learning Culture
What is Agile?
- An iterative and incremental approach
- to performing product development in order to
- accelerate delivery and be more adaptable to changing priorities.
What are the 4 SAFe Core Values?
- Transparency
- Alignment
- Respect for People as Individuals
- Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
What is a “Value Stream?”
A sequence of activities that turn a business hypothesis into a digitally enabled solution.
What is an “Economic View?”
- SAFe Agile Principle
- Deliver often and incrementally
- Value declines over time
What is “Systems Thinking?”
- SAFe Agile Principle
- The system cannot evolve faster than its slowest integration point
Describe “Assume Variability, Preserve Options”
- SAFe Agile Principle regarding the cone of uncertainty
- Iterate with a set-based approach instead of a point based approach
- Preserve options to improve economic results
Describe “Build Incrementally Fast; Integrate Learning Cycles”
- SAFe Agile Principle
- PDCA
- Shorter cycles of development and integration yield faster learning
- Learning loops limit development speed and depend on integration
- Design loops need to be synchronized within ARTs
How do you “Base Milestones On Objective Evaluation of Systems”?
- Avoid phase-gate milestones
- Integrate frequently
- Use “Innovate and Adapt” iterations
- Reduce batch sizes to reduce queue size
- Focus on Progress, Product, and Process metrics with planned incremental system demonstrations
How do you “Make Value Flow without Interruptions”?
- Limit WIP to improve predictability, include non-comitted stories in sprint load
- Reduce optimal batch size to manage reduce total cost and manage transaction and holding costs
- Remember “Little’s Law” (W = L x Lambda or Completion)
- Apply Cadence but synchronize with cross domain planning
- Unlock intrinsic motivation with MAP (Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose)
- Decentralize Decision Making
- Organize around value streams, look for the kidney shape within matrix organizations
What are the 4 factors for estimating?
- Volume
- Complexity
- Knowledge
- Uncertainty
What is the modified Fibonacci Sequence?
1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20
What are the 2 SAFe methods of estimating?
- Relative Estimating
- Normalized Estimation
Describe how you perform “Normalized Estimation”
- 1 Story Point = 1 days worth of work (not time)
- Use relative estimating between stories with this as a point of reference; do not say there are 8 story points is an 8 day duration…
- Capacity is 8 Points / iteration because 2 points removed for meetings
- This includes developing and testing
- All stories are estimated based on this to
- Important for ARTs
How do you effectively use Sprint/Iteration Metrics?
- Reduce the gap between load and velocity to deliver effectively
- Do not plan for velocity as a target
- The difference is in improving the process of understanding the work
What is “Vision” and what questions does it answer?
- Vision fulfills ALIGNMENT with everyone during PI Planning
- Is fulfilled by FEATURES
- Description of the FUTURE STATE of a product
- How will a product solve customer problems?
- What features does it have?
- How will it differentiate us?
- What NFRs will it deliver?
Describe “Features”
- Features fulfill the product vision by addressing user needs and delivering business benefits
- They reside in the ART backlog
- Includes a “Benefit Hypothesis” that justifies development costs
- Includes Functional and Non-Functional requirements
- Are delivered in one Planning Interval and are prioritized by Product Management
- 2 or more features is a capability
What are some basic Agility Quality Practices?
- Shift learning left with frequent code reviews, impolementing continual integration and testing, and involving stakeholders early on within the development process
- Pair Programming and Peer Reviews
- Collective Ownership and T-Shaped Skills with workshops, training, and presentations from team members
- Artifact standards, and definitions of done
- Workflow automation for small batches of repetitive work, such as testing and code integration or deployment
Describe an Agile Team
- 5 - 11 people total
- 2 specialty roles SM or TC and Product Owner who approves completed stories
- cross functional
Describe an ART
- 5-12 teams consisting about 50-125 people
- Goal is to deliver continuous value with minimal overhead
- Deliver 1 feature per Planning Increment that is approved by the Business Owner at the 4th iteration
- Roles include Release Train Engineers (RTEs), Product Management, and Systems Architect (SA)
What are the roles and responsibilities of the Product Management team?
- Collaborate with stakeholders to identify and define customer needs, develop vision, and roadmap
- Approve system demonstrations between iterations
- Collaborates with System Team for demo feedback
What are the roles and responsibilities of the Systems Architect?
- Steers the ART direction
- Evolves the system architecture and ensures the architecture meets the ART’s needs
- Works with the Enterprise Architect
How do Phase-Gate Milestones produce less value?
- They enable large batches of work and long queues
- They foster centralization of requirements and design choices in program management
- They utilize and assume that point-based approaches build solutions correctly the first time
