How to get started with Scaled Agile Framework?

In the digital world of today, organizations must be able to deliver value to their customers faster than ever! This increasing demand for business agility necessitated the need for software development teams to evolve beyond vanilla agile and opt for large scale agile implementations.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is one such methodology that allows companies to apply lean-agile practices at the enterprise level whilst including everyone starting from professionals who gather requirements to teams responsible for deployment and monitoring of production environments. As lucrative as it may sound, application of this framework is considered to be a tedious and complicated job for some. Therefore, I propose the following 10 simple steps that can help you to get started with it right away:

1. Determine your value streams. More commonly understood as product lines, value streams could be aligned to individual business units of a company. For example: Amazon could have its ecommerce platform, prime video, cloud business etc. as individual value streams.
2. Identify your Agile Release Trains. This will be a set of multiple agile teams supposed to work on mentioned value stream.
3. Nominate your Release Train Engineer who is supposed to be the Scrum master of Scrum Masters at the Program Level.
4. Create your epic backlog. To make it easy, treat your projects as epics. Both of them has a business case, the only big difference is that you need to staff a project whereas epics are pulled by stable, pre-existing teams.
5. Fill in the remaining program level roles like Product Managers, System Architects, Business Owners and Release Managers.
6. Establish a DevOps team to help the train release features on demand to their end users.
7. Start pulling epics from the backlog. Ensure that you have done an initial level of analysis on these epics and understand what a minimum viable product (MVP) could be.
8. Create features from epics. A feature is a software requirement that fulfills a stakeholder need.
9. Derive stories from features. User stories are planned and developed within a sprint using Extreme Programming practices.
10. Schedule your first Release Planning session and you are good to go!

Originally published at https://siddhithakkar.com on November 15, 2019.