SAFe or UnSAFe at Any Speed

“I absolutely hate SAFe!” -- Bryan Finster That is Bryan Finster, Distinguished Engineer at Defense Unicorns out of Colorado Springs. I was scrolling through LinkedIn a couple days ago, saw a thread on SAFe, The Scaled Agile Framework, and what I was seeing wasn’t exactly… well, what you’d expect to hear about a framework that’s being used by over 20,000 organizations, including the United States government. Before we get too much into it, here is the definition of SAFe. I took it directly off Scaled Agile, the creators and providers of the SAFe framework: “The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a system for implementing Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices at scale. The Scaled Agile Framework is the most popular framework for leading enterprises because it works: it’s trusted, customizable, and sustainable. If you want to build operational excellence, collaboration, responsiveness, and customer satisfaction into your organizational DNA, where do you start? SAFe provides a proven playbook for transformation.” Some people will argue with “because it works”, and Bryan is one of those people. Here’s what started the whole thing. Bryan posted this on LinkedIn, “Example of terrible ideas propagated by #SAFe: feature teams. A feature team doesn’t own anything. They act as coding mills and have no quality ownership. SAFe recommends them as a method to increase output. It’s a hacky workaround for crappy architecture that results in increased support cost and more crappy architecture.” Tell us what you REALLY think, Bryan! In today’s broadcast, we talk to three people who have varying degrees of opinions on SAFe: Tracy Bannon, Senior Principal/ Software Architect & DevOps Advisor at Mitre, David Bishop, Certified SAFe 5.0 Program Consultant, and of course, Bryan. Stay with for what’s sure to be a fun ride. RESOURCES FROM THIS BROADCAST SAFe: Scaled Agile Framework https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ Bryan Finster https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-finster/ Tracy Bannon https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracylbannon/ David Bishop https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bishop-08528220/