SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) – Software Testing

SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework which was designed by Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jamilo in 2011 to guide organizations in scaling lean and agile practices and achieve their goal of designing an effective system.

The following topics will be discussed here:

What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

SAFe is a freely available and trusted online framework for business agility. It provides a knowledge base to enterprises for scaling agility in a managed and structured way. It is a lightweight framework that along with supporting 80-100 employees organization to large organizations of thousands of employees working over complex, large systems.  

History of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

Initially, Dean Leffingwell in collaboration with other agile community people first described it in a 2007 book. After that, it was progressively worked, refined, and publicly made available with its release in 2011. The framework is continuously developing and updating with its latest version SAFe 5.1 released in February 2021. It is free online so that anyone can take advantage and now it is the most trusted and working framework to attain agility. 

Why use the SAFe Agile Framework?

SAFe is a trusted agile framework and has shown tremendous success for many giant organizations in achieving their goal by delivering quality products without delay and with customer satisfaction. 

It helps an organization by:

• Applying lean-agile principles and system thinking.
• Managing organization by assigning roles and responsibilities to all team members.
• Creating transparency in the working culture and improving the quality of software.
• Make a healthy and happy environment by boosting, and upskilling the limits of employees.
• Decentralize the decision-making process, which reduces action time by team members.
• Creating a portfolio that helps in building a roadmap and vision for the organization
• Use agile and lean practices at an organizational level along with management and a workflow pattern.
• It works on the principles of lean-agile software development.
• It consists of three levels: Team Level, Program Level, and Portfolio Level.
• It is built over three big pillars: agile software development, system thinking, and lean product development.  

Foundation of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

SaFe enables an organization to achieve agility as a whole. The foundation of SAFe is based on the following pillars:

• Use Agile: Agility refers to quick and effective system delivery. SAFe helps an organization in scaling agile practices which starts with planning the scope and requirements of the system as well as the organization. The agile process divides the system into chunks and processes each module at a time which undergoes various software development stages. Dividing the system into modules reduces the risk involvement factor. Agile emphasis on quick and early delivery is needed in today’s fast-moving world.
• Adopt Lean principles: Lean development focuses on minimizing waste like defects, and over-processing during software development. Lean thinking increases the flow of work by focusing on what customers need and what they want to add, it gives developers decision-making power which also increases the flow of work.
• Continuous learning: SAFe always emphasizes a continuous and self-learning process, this process helps in updating the teams and also makes it easy for them to adopt new and changing technology. The scaled agile framework creates a healthy and always ready learning environment for employees which helps in their satisfaction and effective working.
• Customer Satisfaction: The only and only important basic building block of SAFe is to satisfy customers and a happy customer increases the growth of an organization. SAFe introduces customer opinion at every stage of system development which lets them know the progress of their system and also, they can interrupt at any stage when they are not satisfied with system behavior. Finally, all this leads to the development of a successful system.

SAFe incorporates the agile core values with an agile manifesto to its foundation layer.

Lean-agile Principles of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

The lean-agile principles that SAFe follows to make it easy to design a customer requirement are as:

1. An organization needs to plan its budget.
2. Before starting working on a system all team members understand what is a system and what is its functioning so that a successful and effective system can be designed.
3. Various ways to achieve goals should be made at the beginning of the software development so that if one fails then we can move on with another plan.
4. Build the system in small repeatedly integrated cycles.
5. The developed system is in chunks like the traditional waterfall model where the complete system is developed at a time. This reduces time and increases efficiency.
6.  All work is balanced and planned.
7. Motivate the team members and push their skills to produce better outcomes.
8. SAFe does not follow the concept of one “Boss”, where all members can decide on their knowledge and everyone knows other’s decisions and work.

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) Core Values

SAFe Core Values

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consists of four core values, which are Alignment, Built quality, Transparency, and Program execution.

1. Alignment: All planning and working are synchronized and managed at a place for understanding by all and one in an organization which helps in the alignment of the organization. By keeping everything on the whiteboard it becomes visible to all working members and becomes easy to understand and organize things. All planning is done at the initial stages which helps in achieving the goal of the organization.
2. Built-in-Quality: According to SAFe quality cannot be achieved, at the end of product delivery it should be incorporated at the start of the system building. It is of prime focus, it should be emphasized at every stage of system development and it can be achieved by pointing over system quality, code quality and release quality.
3. Transparency: Transparency in working in the organization creates a healthy ambiance and builds the trust of employees. It makes the organization a robust and less error-prone system. By creating transparent work culture, if someone is stuck in-between some functionality, then it can be easily resolved without much time wastage as everyone knows what is going on and where it is.
4. Program Execution: It is the center or we can say the heart of agile framework. It states, that a working system is more important as multiple teams communicate and integrate their work to achieve an executable system. After developing each module, it is executed to check whether it is working or not.

Why Use Agile Framework?

The agile framework provides us a medium to implement agile methodology through its user-friendly, easy, and effective approach. There are 3 available agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and XP and their use depends on the requirements of the system and development team. The working of these agile frameworks follows agile manifesto principles and core values. We use the agile framework as:

• It helps in managing agile practices.
• It helps in early delivery like Scrum defines the development in Sprint which usually last for 2 to 4 weeks.
• It helps in making employees satisfied as every work is visualized to all members like in the Kanban to-do list and system progress is visible on a whiteboard in form of sticky notes, which are removed from left to right on their completion.
• It also helps in communication between team members in form of face-to-face meetings, which let them know the work progress.
• The agile frameworks are easy to use and understand, which makes working with agile uncomplicated.

These agile frameworks are useful at team level use of agile for software development but when an organization wants to implement agile at the whole organizational level then Scaled Agile Framework is use.

Lean-agile Leaders

Lean-agile Leaders are the learner and trained teachers, who help the organization in the successful adoption of SAFe by making team members (including senior members) familiar with its methodology and work culture. When an organization thinks to adopt SAFe then, first of all, they need to select a group of employees for their SAFe training from some authorized training center, and these people after learning all concept of SAFe become Lean-agile leaders, who guide the organization at every step for building better end product by using agile framework. 

Role of lean-agile leaders:

• Helps in learning lean-agile principles to the organization.
• Motivates and guide employees of organization for working over SAFe.
• The development of employees by upskilling and pushing their boundaries helps in making them comfortable in the new working environment.
• Direct the team members of the organization.
• Unite the members of the organization to make them feel all are one and working to achieve the same goal.

When To Use SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework?

We use SAFe in the following cases:

• There are various agile frameworks available to implement agile in the software development process by a developer team but when an organization wants to scale agile practices to all levels of organization among multiple teams then the available agile framework cannot stand as they individually cannot maintain and organise teams.
• When you want to apply lean and agile practices to non-technical departments like finance.
• With a number of teams, it is not easy to assign individual tasks and communication between teams.
• When an organization wants to increase its productivity with managed plans, a focused approach, and quality output without delay in product delivery and deployment.
• When a team member wants to decide independently that is they want to overcome the centralized approach of decision making.  

Levels in SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework

The working of SAFe is defined by its layers or levels. These levels help in building quality software using agile methodology.

In earlier versions of SAFe, there were only 3 levels (Team, Program, and Portfolio level) and are used to design small and simple systems by small groups of people but when it comes to large systems and complete organizations this form of SAFe does not sustain. To address the above problem, in SAFe 4.0, the fourth level was introduced which is the Value Stream level.

Let’s take a deep dive to understand all 4 levels.

1. Team level:

Team level is the lowermost level of Scaled Agile Framework which helps in passing values for ART. At this level, there are agile teams that contain a scrum master, Product Owner, and Development team, all working together to achieve the same goal. Here, values are created by using stories that are made by epics (contain a number of stories), and the stories are developed in a sprint, a sprint defines the time interval to release a story. An iterative process of PI continuously goes on till all values are passed.

Key Members and their roles are as:

• The product owner creates a program backlog that contains all information on requirements, stories, sprints, etc. The stories can be produced by using any agile frameworks like scrum, kanban, and XP programming. 
• Scrum master is the working member of a particular agile team and it organizes all stories, synchronizes them, and participates in face-to-face periodic meetings.
• The development team deals with the development of values.

2. Program Level:

This level lies above Team Level and it uses values passed by the team level for its ART (Agile Release Train). The main hero in this level is ART, which is a continuous pipeline for delivering solutions, integrating all values, and releasing them. 

The working of program level is handled by: 

• ART engineer who maintains ART.
• System architect who is responsible for the design and working of Pi.
• Product Management and DevOps, play an important role in the deployment of the system.

3. Portfolio Level:

Portfolio Level is a cream layer of SAFe configuration which helps an organization in its strategic planning by using lean-agile practices. At this level, the purpose, goal, strategies, and methods to achieve the ultimate objective of the organization in the shortest possible time are defined. 

Key Members:

• Epic Owner, who is responsible for the creation, and execution of epics (use to create stories) and prioritizing them in the program backlog.
• Enterprise Architecture to design the workflow of the whole process.
• Lean portfolio Management is responsible to use lean budget practices for better and effective use of funds of an organization.

Incorporating everything, we can say this level is all about how an organization can achieve its goal with budget management using lean management practices.  

4. Value Stream Level:

This level was introduced in SAFe 4.0, This additional level is meant for large size organization that deals with complex solution. It requires multiple ART (called Solution ART) and solution to meet the complex solution requirements. To manage and coordinate between multiple ART additional role of Value Stream engineer, Solution Engineer, and Solution Management is added to this level.   

Configuration Of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

SAFe 5.0 enables organizations to attain agility irrespective of size, globally. It shows the drastic transformation in the growth of the organization and delivery of the quality product. SAFe comprises four types of configurations.

1. Essential SAFe: The most basic, essential, and foremost SAFe configuration. It is the simplest configuration that revolves around lean-agile principles and ART (Agile Release Train). The working of this configuration is dependent on ART which helps in passing values and solution making. By using the ART concept all team members are continuously working to achieve the solution with possible shortest delivery time by maintaining the quality of system. 
2. Large Solution SAFe: This configuration of SAFe is useful when an organization deals with a large and complex system, it uses multiple ART for the development of a large system and passes the value stream with the help of multiple ART. As large solution SAFe works for large and complex solution so the role of team members also increase with the increase in number of artifacts and supply of input. It is used in industries like automobile, aerospace, defense, and government where instead of the portfolio, the solution is main focus.
3. Portfolio SAFe: It is a simple configuration of SAFe which helps an organization in implementing portfolio by extending the features of essential SAFe configuration, it also helps the organization in self-learning of employees and maintaining agile. Portfolio SAFe works at portfolio level where it aligns the enterprise strategies along with solution development through one or more value streams. It explains the role of artifacts, events involve in portfolio configuration and is useful for small to medium scale organizations. 
4. Full SAFe: It is a detailed configuration that is used by large organizations worldwide. It comprises benefits of essential, large solution and portfolio SAFe. It support organization that require hundreds of employees for building and maintaining large, complex system.

How Does SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) Work?

Below are the steps for SAFe:

1. Planning: In SAFe also working starts with planning, where organization plans the roadmap for achieving the goals of organization. The planning phase includes requirement gathering from customers, aligning the roles of team members, incorporating SAFe core values, working of Lean-agile leaders, etc.
2. Configuration Selection: The working of SAFe is totally dependent on the types of SAFe configuration chosen by an organization and this is totally dependent on the needs of customers and the organization. One of the configurations is selected by the enterprise from Essential SAFe, which is the most basic configuration useful for small to medium size systems, Large Solution SAFe is useful for large and complex systems, Portfolio SAFe which includes the portfolio level and Full SAFe which comprises activities of all SAFe.
3. Working of Level: After deciding on configuration, system development on levels start with working on team and program level as they are fundamental levels of all SAFe configuration. At team level, a value stream is pass by agile team members, the value stream is generated by epics and stories which are headed by scrum team members. The value stream is use for ART at program level. This ART continuously releases solutions and with the help of DevOps, the released system is deployed.
4. System release: Finally, an integrated and tested system is handed over to the user. The system is developed in module form with all development and testing stages of SDLC.

The whole working of SAFe focus on principles of agile manifesto as they help in successful achievement of goals and managing the workflow of the organization.

Agile Manifesto

The agile manifesto is a document created by 17 developers which comprises 4 key values and 12 principles. It is believed by authors that developers will use it during software development and this helps them in better version of the developed system.

Values of Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interaction over processes and tools.
• Working Software over comprehensive documents.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• responding to change over following a plan.

Principles of Agile manifesto

1. Customer satisfaction is prime important. 
2. Incorporate the changing requirements of customers at any stage of development process. 
3. Early product delivery.
4. Continuous and together working of all team members in the whole software development process.
5. Motivate, trust and support working people of project.
6. Face-to-face communication between development team.
7. Progress can be achieved by only working software.
8. Maintaining a constant pace by developers and users.
9. Enhancing agility by continuous focus on technical excellence and good design.
10. Working culture of organization is as simple as possible.
11. Working teams should be self-learning and self-organizing for better performance.
12. Regular meetings of teams to become more effective. 

Strengths Of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

• Quality product with customer satisfaction
• Decentralized decision-making helps in reducing the delay in decision-making and quick response.
• Reduces the delivery time of the system.
• Helps in strategic planning of the organization.
• Helps in achieving transparency in the organization
• Helps in collaboration and understanding among cross-functional teams.

Weaknesses Of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

• No long-term planning as customer requirement changes.
• Project Management activities are costly affairs.
• No clear picture of the requirement, scope, and cost of the system due to changing customer requirements.
• Less documentation and more focus on verbal interaction with the customer by which if a new worker introduces or an old one leaves it becomes difficult to understand the working stage of the system.