SAFe Agile
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices. It provides communication, integration, automation, and close cooperation among all the people needed to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a Solution.
What is the role of an Enterprise Architect?
The Enterprise Architect promotes adaptive design, and engineering practices and drives architectural initiatives for the portfolio. Enterprise Architects also facilitate the reuse of ideas, components, services, and proven patterns across various solutions in a portfolio.
What is the Manager's Role on a Self-Organizing Agile Team?
Managers and leaders have a number of roles in agile organizations, including setting product directions, making staffing decisions, and helping team members with professional development. Traditional management often relies more on command rather than influence.
What is a Vision?
The vision is a description of the future state of the Solution under development. It reflects customer and stakeholder needs, as well as the Feature and Capabilities, proposed to meet those needs.
What is a Development Team?
The Development (DEV) Team is a subset of the Agile Team. It consists of the dedicated professionals who can develop and test a Story, Feature, or component. The DEV Team typically includes software developers and testers, engineers, and other dedicated specialists required to complete a vertical slice of functionality.
What is a PROGRAM backlog?
The Program Backlog is the holding area for upcoming Features, which are intended to address user needs and deliver business benefits for a single Agile Release Train (ART). It also contains the enabler features necessary to build the Architectural Runway.
What is a customer?
Customers are the ultimate buyer of every solution. they are an integral part of the Lean-Agile development process and Value Stream and have specific responsibilities in SAFe.
What is a SCRUM Master?
Scrum Masters are servant leaders and coaches for an Agile Team. They help educate the team in SCRUM, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, and SAFe, ensuring that the agreed Agile process is being followed. They also help remove impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement.
What is a story?
A story (or stories) is a short description of a small piece of desired functionality, written in the user's language. Agile Teams implement small, vertical slices of system functionality and are sized so they can be completed in a single Iteration.
What is Agile Architecture?
Agile Architecture is a set of values and practices that support the active evolution of the design and architecture of a system while implementing new system capabilities.
What is a Program Increment (PI)?
A Program Increment (PI) is a timebox during which an Agile Release Train (ART) delivers incremental value in the form of working, tested software and systems. POs are typically 8-12 weeks long. The most common pattern for a PI is four development Iterations, followed by one Innovations and Planning (IP) Iteration.
What are Business Owners?
Business Owners are a small group of stakeholders who have the primary business and technical responsibility for governance, compliance, and return on investment (ROI) for a Solution developed by an Agile Release Train (ART). They are key stakeholder on the ART who must evaluate fitness for use and actively participate in certain ART events.
What is an Agile Team?
An Agile Team is a cross-functional group of 5 to 10 people who have the ability and authority to define, build, an test some element of solution value-all in a short Iteration timebox. Specifically, the team incorporates the DEV team, SCRUM Master, and Product Owners roles.
What is a system demo?
The system Demo is a significant event that provides an integrated view of new Features for the most recent Iteration delivered by all the teams in the Agile Release Train (ART). each demo gives Stakeholders an objective measure of progress during a Program Increment (PI).
What is a capability?
A capability is a higher-level solution behavior that typically spans multiple ARTs. Capabilities are sized and split into multiple features to facilitate their implementation in a single PI.
What Program Increment (PI) Planning?
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and vision.
Epic Owners
Epic Owners are responsible for coordinating portfolio Epics through the Portfolio Kanban system. they define the epic, its Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and Lean Business case, and when approved, facilitate implementation.
What is enabler?
Enablers support the activities needed to extend the Architectural Runway to provide future business functionality. These include exploration, infrastructure, compliance, and architecture development. They are captured in the various backlogs and occur at all levels of the Framework.
What is a milestone?
A milestone is used to track progress toward a specific goal or event. There are three of SAFe milestones: Program Increment (PI), fixed-date, and learning milestones.
What is an Agile foundation?
The foundation contains the supporting principles, values, mindset, implementation guidance, and leadership roles needed to deliver value successfully at scale.
What is a Release Train Engineer (RTE)?
The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART) events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help mange risk, and drive relentless improvement.
What are Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs)?
Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) define system attributes such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, and usability. They serve as constraints or restrictions on the design of the system across the different backlogs.
What is a system team?
The system team is a specialized Agile Team that assists in building and using the Agile development environment, including Continuous integration, test automation, and Continuous Deployment. The System Team supports the integration of assets from Agile teams, performs end-to-end Solution testing where necessary, and assists with deployment and release.
What is a metric?
A metric is agreed-upon measures used to evaluate how well the organization is progressing toward the portfolio, large solution, program, and team's business and technical objectives.
What is a feature?
A feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need. Each feature includes a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria, and is sized or split as necessary to be delivered by a single Agile Release Train (ART) in a Program Increment (PI).
What is an Agile Release Train (ART)?
The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, develops and delivers solutions incrementally, using a series of fixed-length Iterations within a Program Increment (PI) timebox.
What is Portfolio Level?
The Portfolio Level contains the principles, practices, and roles needed to initiate and govern a set of development Value Streams. This is where strategy and investment funding are defined for value streams and their Solutions. This level also provides Agile portfolio operations and Lean governance for the people and resources needed to deliver solutions.
What is a Product Owner?
A product owner is typically a project's key stakeholder. Part of the product owner responsibilities is to have a vision of what he or she wishes to build, and convey that vision to the scrum team. This is key to successfully starting any agile software development project.
What are Iteration Goals?
Iteration goals are a high-level summary of the business and technical goals that the Agile Team agrees to accomplish in an Iteration. They are vital to coordinating an Agile Release Train (ART) as a self-organizing, self-managing team of teams.
What is a Sprint?
A Sprint is an iterative approach that has at its core the sprint — the scrum term for iteration. Scrum teams use inspection throughout an agile project to ensure that the team meets the goals of each part of the process.
What is a Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)?
Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a prioritization model used to sequence jobs. (ex. Features, Capabilities, and Epics) to produce maximum economic benefit. In SAFe, WSJF is estimated as the cost of Delay (COD) divided by job size
What is Product Management?
Product Management has content authority for the Program Backlog. They are responsible for identifying Customer needs, prioritizing Features, guiding the work through the Program Kanban and developing the program Vision and Roadmap.
What is a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is anyone that is potentially affected by the outcome of the project. The term is usually used to name the management or the customers. While the Product Owner is affected by the outcome of the project, it generally NOT seen as a stakeholder. Scrum defines stakeholders as not part of the Scrum-team.
What is Iteration Planning?
Iteration Planning is an event where all team members determine how much of the Team Backlog they can commit to delivering during an upcoming Iteration. The team summarizes the work as a set of committed Iteration Goals.
What is a risk?
Risk is when an uncertain event or condition can occur and have an effect on the project outcome. That effect can be positive or negative. ... (When you're documenting risks, note where impacts to time, cost and quality are likely to occur.)
What is SAFe Agile?
The Scaled Agile Framework (abbreviated as SAFe), is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. Along with large-scale Scrum (LeSS), disciplined agile delivery (DAD), and Nexus, SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team.
What is Release on Demand?
Release on Demand is the process by which Features deployed into production are released incrementally or immediately to Customers based on market demand.
What is Agile Leadership?
Agile Leadership is associated with mode four leaders (Modes of Leadership) who have the ability (and agility) to operate in any mode (system of thinking) and most importantly see from the perspectives of the other modes. It is this ability to think in a number of different ways that gives such leaders their agility.
What is a Retrospective?
The retrospective is a regular meeting where agile team members discuss the results of the iteration, review their practices, and identify ways to improve.
What is constraint?
A constraint is any restriction that defines a project's limitations; the scope, for example, is the limit of what the project is expected to accomplish. ... A project's scope involves the specific goals, deliverables and tasks that define the boundaries of the project.