4 ms·

SAFe is beautiful in that it is the ultimate expression of Enterprise Agile Cargoculting: all pretenses of agility are lost, there are ten different levels of d

SAFe is beautiful in that it is the ultimate expression of Enterprise Agile Cargoculting: all pretenses of agility are lost, there are ten different levels of decision making, and all responsibility is diffused in a confused mess of worker bees running around under an all-powerful and all-seeing LPM > Individual teams can use whatever they want to manage themselves (Kanban, Lean, Scrum, etc…up to the team) Except that they can't, because they will need to align on PI dates based on sprint durations, publish their burndown statistics and various other measures, and there's no way the poor soul who is reponsible for collating that will go into several different tools > Estimations planning and commitments for each quarter are done by developers exclusively, including coordinating across teams No they're not, they're done by the product owners, the system architects, the release train engineers (shhh... don't call them project managers), the product managers etc > Releases can happen at any point In my experience, releases can only happen at the end of a program increment, or maybe at the end of each sprint because until then nobody has integrated everything together > A strong and continuously improving CI/CD pipeline is an expectation. Fair enough, until the "innovation sprint" becomes the "bugfix spring" and all those good resolutions fly out of the window > I really wish more people knew about SAFe. So do I, just like I wish more people knew about colorectal cancer > It’s constantly improving and refining the experience and from what I have seen, if there is a better way to do things SAFe will become it. SAFe is constantly evolving, because that's the easiest way to keep the money coming in. It's as if PADI had found a way to change diving equipment every 2 years and ask everyone to recertify Sorry for the tone, but I still have PTSD

brightball 5y ago
You have PTSD from a bastardized version of SAFe, based on your description.
- namdnay 5y ago
  Judging by the number of SAFe consultants (complete with that video of a guy drawing comic-book style diagrams about spotify, cute the first time but infuriating after the 10th) I'd have to say that if our SAFe was bastardised maybe SAFe itself is a bastard
  - brightball 5y ago
    I know many companies running SAFe on the east coast and it’s generally an improvement across the board from everybody I talk to. The only problems I’ve seen are from 2 camps: the people who don’t want to have to plan anything and the people who want everything that is planned to be 100% accurate and not a best guess. Either of these two groups will cause problems to a process like this with the latter usually being in some type of leadership role. SAFe consultants or not, it’s still up to your company leadership to implement it. A lot of SAFe consultants I have talked to try to advocate for things that follow Scrum because many teams are already familiar with it. This is honestly one of the biggest issues that I have found with the teaching. 80% of SAFe is based on Donald Reniertson’s “2nd Generation Lean Product Development” book, which is fantastic. Once you’ve read that it’s easy to spot the differences.
    - namdnay 5y ago
      come on... https://www.agilest.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/scaled-agile-framework-4-5-big-picture.png https://www.agilest.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/scaled-ag... how dysfunctional must an organisation be for that to be an improvement? And in what way is that agile?
      - brightball 5y ago
        I hate that diagram. It looks like gibberish to anyone who hasn’t gone through a training to understand it, and even this it still looks like gibberish. SAFe is about addressing the communication problems that happen as an organization grows. You’re looking at the diagram for everything that would be applied to a very large organization. SAFe itself has a goal of using 50-150 person “release trains” that are essentially independent units. That’s the core of what’s going on. Everything outside of that is about managing communication between other “trains”. In the diagram that you’re looking at, the bottom 2 sections where the CD Pipeline sits is where most developers will experience SAFe and you’ll find that it simply advocates for DevOps best practices. I completely understand how everything else looks like a mess. It’s a lot to digest.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  One thing I've noticed with Scrum and SAFe are that all negative experiences are not _true_ scrum/safe. It seems entirely natural that processes will shift as team composition changes or the rules chafe. Once there's been drift from the canonical process there doesn't seem any way out of that except doubling down, possibly by buying more training.

brightball 5y ago

You have PTSD from a bastardized version of SAFe, based on your description.

namdnay 5y ago
Judging by the number of SAFe consultants (complete with that video of a guy drawing comic-book style diagrams about spotify, cute the first time but infuriating after the 10th) I'd have to say that if our SAFe was bastardised maybe SAFe itself is a bastard
- brightball 5y ago
  I know many companies running SAFe on the east coast and it’s generally an improvement across the board from everybody I talk to. The only problems I’ve seen are from 2 camps: the people who don’t want to have to plan anything and the people who want everything that is planned to be 100% accurate and not a best guess. Either of these two groups will cause problems to a process like this with the latter usually being in some type of leadership role. SAFe consultants or not, it’s still up to your company leadership to implement it. A lot of SAFe consultants I have talked to try to advocate for things that follow Scrum because many teams are already familiar with it. This is honestly one of the biggest issues that I have found with the teaching. 80% of SAFe is based on Donald Reniertson’s “2nd Generation Lean Product Development” book, which is fantastic. Once you’ve read that it’s easy to spot the differences.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    come on... https://www.agilest.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/scaled-agile-framework-4-5-big-picture.png https://www.agilest.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/scaled-ag... how dysfunctional must an organisation be for that to be an improvement? And in what way is that agile?
    - brightball 5y ago
      I hate that diagram. It looks like gibberish to anyone who hasn’t gone through a training to understand it, and even this it still looks like gibberish. SAFe is about addressing the communication problems that happen as an organization grows. You’re looking at the diagram for everything that would be applied to a very large organization. SAFe itself has a goal of using 50-150 person “release trains” that are essentially independent units. That’s the core of what’s going on. Everything outside of that is about managing communication between other “trains”. In the diagram that you’re looking at, the bottom 2 sections where the CD Pipeline sits is where most developers will experience SAFe and you’ll find that it simply advocates for DevOps best practices. I completely understand how everything else looks like a mess. It’s a lot to digest.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
One thing I've noticed with Scrum and SAFe are that all negative experiences are not _true_ scrum/safe. It seems entirely natural that processes will shift as team composition changes or the rules chafe. Once there's been drift from the canonical process there doesn't seem any way out of that except doubling down, possibly by buying more training.