It is simple and light-weight framework, yet it is able to handle the needs of large value streams and complex system development. By implementing the SAFe agile framework, you will have the following benefits:
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Therefore, agile software development teams have to collaborate with many different parties. In addition, teams need the support of different organizational functions like marketing, sales, or the human resources department [2]. Especially in established large companies, it is difficult to change the existing hierarchical structures, silo knowledge, and traditional mindset. For the development of safety-critical products like cars, traditional systems engineering processes are still in use and define a framework for the underlying agile, hybrid, or traditional subprojects [3]. This gap between the agile way of working of development teams and the traditional approach of the surrounding organization leads to problems regarding the collaboration between an agile team and its environment, so-called interface problems [2]. Since the environment is important in order to allow agile teams to thrive [4], efficient collaboration between agile teams and the environment on which they depend is important.
The research themes from these workshops show the need to investigate how autonomous teams collaborate with their organizational environment. Every team is dependent on organizational functions, independent of whether they are part of a scaled agile project or working as a single team. In the scaled context, additional dependencies occur. Team-level agile methods like Scrum, Kanban, or XP only discuss a few of these dependencies, namely the interface to the customer in the form of the Product Owner, as well as the Scrum Master, who shields the team from negative influences from the organization or resolves impediments caused by the environment.
In order to get a more complete picture, we wanted to investigate so-called scaling agile frameworks in terms of their support of those interfaces. We initially considered the list collected for a comparison of scaling agile frameworks [9]. We then focused on the frameworks that not only deal with scaled product development (e.g., Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, or Nexus), but also offer solutions for a complete agile organization. The expectation was that these frameworks provide support when synchronizing agile teams with their environment.
We selected the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the Disciplined Agile (DA) Framework, Scrum at Scale (SaS), and the lesser known Recipes for Agile Governance (RAGE). These frameworks had the largest scope, thus we hoped to identify the most complete list of dependencies between agile teams and the rest of the organization.
First, a student researcher systematically went through all these parts of SAFe to identify all mentioned dependencies between an agile team and its environment and noted down all dependencies in a document. Independently, the two authors investigated SAFe regarding concepts that align the agile team with dependent organizational parts. This was not done systematically, but based on previous experiences of the authors with scaling agile frameworks in general and SAFe in particular. Afterwards, the two authors checked the dependencies found by the systematic analysis of the student researcher and had a closer look into the information that is provided by SAFe on how to handle these dependencies.
Guidance is also needed on how agile teams should coordinate activities such as architecture or testing within a scaled product development. As an example, [12] investigated the collaboration between architects and agile teams - similar guidance is needed for other aspects.
SAFe provides an example of how business teams align with the agile teams they support within an ART. A three-step process for integrating business functions into the ART is defined (cf. Sect. 3, business teams). First, business teams are required to understand agile and live the mindset themselves. In practice, companies that start with an agile transformation using SAFe adapt the framework to their own purpose and situation. Often, the surrounding organization is not touched and business functions continue to work in their established processes. A survey of SAFe adoptions also reported challenges regarding mindset change [14]. Guidance for assessing and improving the agility of teams is provided by [15].
Large organizations often have big projects executed by large and distributed development organizations, requiring agile methods to be scaled. According to (Leffingwell 2007), scaling involves many challenges, including coordination between several agile teams, lack of up-front architecture, lack of requirements analysis, as well as all the challenges of distributed projects, as many large organizations are distributed. Despite these challenges, many large companies have chosen to adopt agile methods, even though research on how to scale agile methods to large-scale projects (Hossain et al. 2009), and on successfully conducting agile transformations in large organizations is largely missing (Dikert et al. 2016).
During recent years frameworks for scaling agile software development have been suggested by several consultants, e.g., the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) (Leffingwell 2015), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) (Larman and Vodde 2015), and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) (Ambler 2012). However, documented experiences on the usage of these frameworks is still scarce, e.g., how they are used, to what kind of circumstances they are best suited, and what the challenges and success factors of their usage are. The State of Agile Survey (VersionOne 2016) shows that a large number of companies seem to be using some framework, as 27% of the respondents reported using SAFe, 6% LeSS and 4% DAD. In addition, most respondents (72%) stated using Scrum or Scrum-of-Scrums to help to scale (respondents could make multiple selections).
Many interviewees expressed that starting with acommon agile framework that teams could later on tailor to their needs would have been preferable, as that was how it was done for example in another still on-going agile project at site A, from where many managers, coaches, and team members had been moved to this project. Several interviewees commented that having acommon framework, like in that previous project, would have been abetter solution to this project as well.
However, in practice this was not possible, as a large part of the personnel in this new project was new to agile or had little familiarity with agile, and thus needed basic training and a framework to start with, before they could start modifying it. Interviewed developers that had moved from that other project to the case project, found having a common agile framework with common Scrum trainings a much better way of starting the transformation than giving quite free hands to the teams.
The evidence regarding the problems related to the lack of a common agile framework came from a few respondents, who had participated in an earlier agile transformation within Ericsson. While small in the number of respondents, their insights were deep, and they discussed the issue at depth in our interviews. They very strongly recommended that a common framework should be used instead of giving teams too much autonomy too soon.
Part of the interviewees had experience from another, still ongoing, project at one of the sites (reported in (Paasivaara et al. 2013)). There, the agile transformation had started a few years earlier with heavy support from an external consulting company with common trainings for all, as this was the first agile project at that site. A common Scrum framework was used by all in the beginning, and later on modified towards Scrumban. After the common start the teams got more freedom and took responsibility also in customizing their own way of working. Thus, persons coming from this background to our case project, like many of the coaches and managers, knew that pure Scrum needs to be customized. Moreover, as part of the team members had some agile knowledge already, the teams were given quite free hands to customize, which however did not lead to perfect results.
When comparing the literature findings to our case, we may hypothesize that the lack of common trainings across the sites, the lack of sufficient and unified coaching and the lack of a clear common approach led to a lack of unified agile mindset and understanding. Thus, giving teams autonomy without enough coaching led to a suboptimal agile implementation in the teams. Interviewees with background from the other transformation within Ericsson, asked for a common framework, as they thought that model had worked well in the previous transformation. Such a framework with common and similar trainings across the sites could have supported the organization in finding a common direction in agile, and thus providing a common ground for teams to customize the practices later on.
In retrospect, starting with a common agile framework and common trainings seems rather self-evident, and indeed that seems to be the presumption behind any agile implementation, for both large and small organizations. However, the fact that our case organization did not do this, and subsequently run into problems seems to validate this idea, which is increasingly important as the organization grows, as inter-team coordination otherwise becomes very difficult or impossible.
Lesson 4: A lack of common agile framework to start with, a lack of common trainings across sites, and a lack of sufficient and unified coaching may lead to a lack of common direction in the agile implementation.
There is little systematically conducted research on large-scale agile adoption (Dikert et al. 2016). Practitioner literature suggests several scaling frameworks that are actively promoted by their developers. However, independently documented experiences on the usage, customization and benefits of these frameworks is still lacking. Thus, finding validated solutions on what the end result of a transformation should look like or what steps to take is difficult. 2ff7e9595c
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