Why is Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) Wrong?

Every “SAFe®” team I witnessed failed Agile to a certain degree. Without comprehensive Automated End-to-End Regression Testing, how can SAFe® scale or be safe?

This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series.

According to this page on Atlassian, the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is “a set of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale”.

I dislike the one symbol and one word in the above definition.

• Trademark sign ®
  It is a bad sign in the context of the software development process and reminds me of the infamous Rational United Process (RUP). Have you ever seen this sign for good software advancements, such as Refactoring, TDD, Continous Integration, …? No, you don’t. The trademark sign means commercial.

• Enterprise
  After working in the software industry for over 25 years, I developed alerts when seeing ‘Enterprise’ in any software terms, such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Enterprise Service Bus, and XXX Enterprise Edition. From my experience, this word means expensive, over-engineered, and not working.

Table of Contents:
· Certification on Agile is Wrong!
· SAFe® itself is against the value of Agile
· If a software team wants to do real Agile, adopt XP
· Scrum or SAFe®, makes no difference to my work
· My view of the “Built-in quality” in SAFe
  ∘ Done
  ∘ Quality, Quality, Quality, Quality, Quality, Quality, Quality

Certification on Agile is Wrong!

Agile Alliance and the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto discourage Agile Certification. For more, check out this article: Certification on Agile is Wrong!

Therefore, be aware of any “Agile Certifications”. From my observation, so-called whole-team agile training and certification are a waste of time, often, worse than useless. For example, “estimating user story points” are often included in ‘agile training’. Check out this article: Estimating User Story Points is a Waste of Time for the real Agile experts’ view on that.

SAFe is probably the most successfully marketed training/certification ‘framework’. Below is one training/certification offered by a provider.

SAFe® itself is against the value of Agile

Let’s review the core Agile values, defined in the Agile Manifesto.

Agile Manifesto

Read the tweet by the renowned Agile expert: Allen Holub.

Agile Expert Allen Holub’s tweet

It is hard to argue, isn’t it? For more, check out Allen’s keynote presentation from Software Architect 2014.

on YouTube

If a software team wants to do real Agile, adopt eXtreme Programming (XP)

Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and XP are all agile processes, the best one is XP. XP started Agile, developed by the Agile Father: Kent Beck. Even after 20 years, Robert Martin, one co-author of Agile Manifesto, still thinks XP is the best-defined Agile process.

Check out my article, XP (eXtreme Programming) is better than Scrum, as XP defined DevOps 20 years ago.

“Certified SAFe® Agilist”: here are some other opinions

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelcampbell2006_safedelusion-activity-6993189552622362624-lBOd

My job is doing test automation and Continuous Testing, I worked well in all methodologies, including Waterfall. Programmers introduce software defects daily, better software testing is always required. Test Automation, even fake agile coaches would admit, is the foundation of all Agile processes.

When I worked/consulted/coached in client projects, I rarely commented on their so-called Agile processes. But I do observe a common problem, those teams focused too much effort on useless processes, leading to poor outcomes. On the contrary, when (rarely) the №1 priority of the team is Automated End-to-End (via UI) regression testing, it is a complete game-changer: much higher velocity (better than ‘on time on budget’), customer satisfaction, daily production releases, no defect tracking, high team morale, …, etc.

“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.

“It was Scott and his team of programmers who completely overhauled how LinkedIn develops and ships new updates to its website and apps, taking a system that required a full month to release new features and turning it into one that pushes out updates multiple times per day.”
— The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits, Wired, 2013

My view of the “Built-in quality” in SAFe

Quality Assurance is my area, so I comment on that.

“In the SAFe framework, agility should never come at the cost of quality. SAFe requires teams at all levels to define what “done” means for each task or project and to bake quality development practices into every working agreement. According to SAFe, there are five key dimensions of built-in quality: flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality.” — Atlassian’s What is SAFe? page

My overall feeling: too vague. No one company will publicly say “we don’t care about the quality”. Here, I share my views on the two terms in the above SAFe Quality paragraph.