Safe Agile Best Practices

Once organizations have decided to adopt the “Agile” approach for developing and delivering their products, they have to decide the framework that would best suit the needs of the company. Enterprises that are spread across many locations with different branches and take up complex projects, cannot use Scrum as it does not give the benefits expected to run the company. Hence, these top organizations implement the Scaled Agile Framework, which is designed by Scaled Agile Inc. for their product/project development. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an efficient and effective Agile method that is best suited for multinational corporations that handle several complex projects simultaneously.  

What is the Scaled Agile Framework?

SAFe is a set of workflow and organizational patterns that implements Agile practices at the level of enterprises. It consists of all the structural guidance on planning and managing the work, the values to follow, and the roles and responsibilities of the members of the team. The main aim of SAFe is to collaborate, align, and deliver across several Agile teams. SAFe has formed around three knowledge bodies- Lean product development, system thinking, and Agile software development. SAFe provides a structure for businesses that grow such that they can scale Agile effectively. SAFe evolved as businesses needed to respond to the market change and improve the solution delivery to meet the needs of the customer. In the present day, SAFe is implemented by most of the top organizations and has become one of the popular frameworks.

What are the Challenges faced by SAFe?

Scaling Agile has provided many benefits such as increased visibility to a project, inclusion of the customer into the product development process, and increased responsibility by the development team. However, the business goals and missions cannot be completed by a single development team and Agile has to be applied across larger teams. At this point, three factors become a challenge and have to be resolved before the organization has scaled Agile to the enterprise level. These factors are:

Size of the team: In Scrum and Agile methods such as Extreme programming (XP), there were typically 7-10 team members in a single team, which made communication easier and for everyone to take up the responsibility of the work. However, organizations that function at a larger scale would have to coordinate with a 100-person or larger development team and implement Agile practices in such teams. These teams may face issues when they have to interact with other businesses such as system integration, marketing, project management, quality assurance, etc. The main challenge would be the interaction between such a population and making sure that the product is developed and delivered on time. 

Project Complexity: The systems used in such large organizations must have strict quality attributes needs such as precise real-time, security requirements, and high reliability. The company has to employ large-scale systems that have multiple external stakeholders and interfaces. Here, the systems must go through rigorous verification and validation which can make the frequent deployment practices used in Agile complicated.

Duration: The company has to determine the amount of time it would take the system to be developed, while also knowing the duration of operations and sustainment. Larger systems should stay in development and operations for a longer time than products developed by Agile development. This requires the company to pay attention to changes that may take place in the future, the possibility of redesigns, and also maintaining various delivered versions. 

These are the challenges that have to be understood by every business before implementing SAFe and also here are the SAFe Agile practices that help businesses overcome these challenges and achieve Agile at scale.

Best Scaled Agile Framework Practices 

Not all organizations have to function in the same way to achieve their full potential, it all depends on the type of company and its members. All the SAFe Agile practices have their limitations and there is nothing that would suit all types of businesses. However, one has to assess each practice and evaluate how it would benefit the company. By keeping the mission, vision, and goals of the company, one can adopt the SAFe best practices that would help the company flourish in the market.

1. Team coordination should be the Top Priority

All the SAFe team members have worked in a Scrum environment which was all about creating the product with team building and management. The Scrum environment consisted of a Scrum Team with the authority, skills, and knowledge that was essential to establish the requirements, design, architect, code, and test the system. However, as the system grows, the single team cannot handle all the operations as it becomes complex. This requires the team to use methods to increase the coordination between teams such as the Scrum of Scrum approach where Scrum is extended to multiple teams. This is a special coordination team that would define the information flow among the Developers and identify, analyze, and solve the issues with ordinations and potential risks that may become a consequence. 

The Scrum of Scrum would consist of members chosen from each team to address the functionality or cross-cutting concerns such as architecture, deployment, user interface design, and integration testing. This team helps the company to coordinate the work smoothly and ensures that the correct information about the issues, risks, and measurements is communicated among the teams. Always make sure that the Scrum teams themselves do not get crowded and everyone on the team should be heard and should present their matters effectively. This method would have proven to effectively manage larger Agile teams to succeed and work on complex projects without much hassle. 

2. Managing Technical Complexity with the architectural runway

When tasks take more than a single release cycle or iteration, and also could not be allocated to different teams, technical complexity arises. Here, the work cannot be easily partitioned such that teams work on it concurrently and independently to develop their solution. In these cases, a successful approach to manage technical complexity is to include a software architectural feature that is predefined at the organizational level as a software product line or infrastructural platform. The pre-staging of architectural features, in Agile, is known as architectural runway which is used by the Developers. This runway provides a sense of stability which is crucial for future developments and iterations. 

This software would decide the architectural features that are required by the system by evaluating the quality attributes requirements of the system. This helps the team to develop customer-centric features and gain customer satisfaction from the products. This runway helps the team to uncover the technical risks in a much earlier phase of development and reduces the complexity of the product development. When teams discover the quality attribute concerns such as security, availability, and performance, earlier in the iteration, yields significant progress and much early delivery of the product. 

3. Aligning system decomposition and feature-based development

Agile teams implement a specific feature to all the components of the system which helps the team to focus on factors that would value the stakeholders. This approach is called vertical alignment as each component is being updated with the feature implemented by the team. However, based on the architectural needs of the system, system decomposition can be horizontal which focuses on variability mechanisms and common services that provide reuse. When a system decomposition and feature-based development is created, the team could be aligned horizontally, vertically, or in combination, with flexibility. When companies need to balance the rapid progress and have to become Agile with stability, similar architectural patterns are required. Fast-featured development is enabled by teams by creating platforms that contain development environments and commonly used services. 

4. Clarify architecturally significant requirements using quality-attribute scenarios

The features that are most important for the end-users are the most important factors for the success of the product. However, when the teams exclusively concentrate on the functionality of the end-user, the significant architectural requirements are not noticed by the team. The team has to document, elicit, communicate, and validate the quality scenarios that are underlying during the architectural runway development. This helps the team when the projects have higher sustainability and longevity needs. The team has to assess the quality attribute scenarios so that it understands which significant architectural requirement is needed in the early stages of development. Deciding the scale at which the product has to be scaled could be one of the attributes that the team can decide upon. Whether to scale up to millions of users or just keep the scaling up to thousands as it is a trial product, would help the team think about the requirements that are essential for the team at the moment. 

5. Continuous and early focus on verification can be achieved by using test-driven development

“Focus on the rainy day scenarios as much as you focus on the sunny day scenarios and always write your test before you write the system.”, is the general rule of this practice. When the extensive testing is left to the end of the project, it becomes difficult to identify scenarios and the developers end up overlooking them. Tests should always be written first at the system or business level (which is called acceptance test-driven development) and different system failure modes should be considered. This helps the other practices to look out for challenging properties and aspects of the system such as architectural concerns and quality attributes.

Mastering SAFe: Overcoming Challenges with Best Practices for Large Enterprises

SAFe was developed by experimenting with various ways on a trial and error basis where the Development Team concluded all the strategies that best suited large organizations. This was later formed into a framework that included all the necessary tools and techniques that would run the company effectively. SAFe has become one of the most popular frameworks among many organizations as it offers all the benefits that Scrum could not offer. However, it becomes crucial for organizations to know the SAFe Agile best practices and implement them in their enterprise so that they can achieve the best out of SAFe. This article focuses on the challenges of SAFe and the best SAFe Agile practices that could overcome those challenges.

Also, Check:How to build an agile team 

Conclusion

Understanding and implementing of SAFe Agile practices requires professionals to be the best in their field and have abundant knowledge about the SAFe framework. When companies have understood what kind of challenges they are facing, they have to decide on what type of SAFe practices have to be implemented. It is always advisable to know the needs of the company in a better way and understand where exactly the problem lies. Based on this understanding, the appropriate type of practice can be adopted.

For professionals who have experienced Scrum, these practices may seem challenging at the beginning. However, as they understand the values and principles of Scaled Agile and know how the development process takes place in this environment, they will get accustomed to the type of Scaled Agile practice and perform their best to achieve success.

Simpliaxis offers the SAFe® Advanced Scrum Master (SASM) Certification, which is designed to help professionals gain a deep understanding of SAFe practices. This course prepares individuals to effectively implement and optimize SAFe practices, ensuring they can tackle challenges and drive their organizations toward success.