Pass the Baton SAFe(ly) - Part 1
January 29, 2016

Nicole Bryan
Tasktop

If you are old enough to have watched "I Love Lucy," you likely recall the famous chocolate factory episode in which Lucy and Ethel were fighting a losing battle to package more chocolates. Lucy's major problem with the task was simply that she didn't have enough people helping her. And that's mostly true with manufacturing. Factories scale well and have a strong tendency to get more efficient as they get bigger.

So why is it, then, that building software seems to have the opposite effect of reducing efficiency as you scale up?

Dean Leffingwell, the creator of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), summed it up quite well. He noted that building large scale systems is fundamentally a social event – not a manufacturing event.

In fact, you could make the case that Agile at its core was the first realization of that. Consider what Agile represents:

■ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

■ Working software over comprehensive documentation

■ Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

■ Responding to change over following a plan

But remember, Agile originally was predicated on small – not big. And to get the most out of people in a large social event, you need an underlying structure. For example, you may not have thought about it, but big sporting events, large conferences and weddings all have quite a bit of structure. A football game has four quarters and halftime. Conferences have keynotes and sessions. But software development doesn't have structure. People don't walk into a large organization and intuitively know how to participate in the social event of building software. To date, there simply hasn't been an underlying structure.

It is possible, however, to have a repeatable underlying structure to the act of building large scale software. And that underlying structure is SAFe, which was predicated on the original notions of Agile. And Agile is really the first methodology that articulated that software is about people – a social event. So, by definition, SAFe is trying to apply the principles of people at a much larger scale.

Looking One Layer Deeper

But, even if you believe in SAFe as I do, you still have a high likelihood of failure unless you look one level deeper. Because to bring the structure to life, you also need what I call "currencies for communication." Consider a relay race in which the baton is the sole currency for communication. If it is dropped, then communication is over. The structure of the race is there – but it is brought to life by the passing of that baton – the currency for communication.

Currencies for communication are shared in common for at least a moment, form the basis for communicating and are ever more important as social events get larger. So what are the currencies for communication for scaled software development? The artifacts that are managed in tools – the defects, the requirements, the epics, the stories, the test cases.

And in software, many of these currencies for communication have to "morph." When I pass the baton to the next runner the baton is exactly the same. But in software, I need my top level corporate goals (make more money) to morph into "epics" that then morph into more detailed "stories." And then my stories get decorated with defects and test cases.

Software development, project management and DevOps tools are the holders of the currencies for communication – the artifacts. But different tools came into being by looking at the social event from different perspectives. It is like looking through a prism at the social event. Every tool fundamentally is looking at the software/social event through its own prism.

Each prism is legitimate. In fact, all are needed to have the best possible outcome. But each tool takes a certain perspective: What a software developer needs and the associated prism is quite different from the portfolio manager's prism.

So we've got all these different tools that collectively house all the necessary currencies for communication. But what is fundamentally missing is a way to pass the baton between the prisms with ease and the allowance for morphing over time.

Integration with SLI Strategy

SAFe needs one more piece to "crack the nut" of building large scale software effectively, a software lifecycle integration (SLI) strategy.

A SLI strategy looks at the underlying structure of SAFe, identifies the currencies for communication at the different pass-off points – and ensures smooth passing that allows (and in fact encourages) morphing.

The good news is that SLI Patterns can help. These patterns:

■ Identify the people (roles) at a particular juncture in the social event that need to communicate.

■ Identify the artifact(s) that will act as the currency for communication for that situation.

■ Acknowledge and provide guidance on how currencies might morph and how to maintain the relationships between the currencies.

■ For each juncture, an SLI pattern recognizes that the tooling on either side of the juncture will often be different.

■ Identify the style of communication.

Read: Pass the Baton SAFe(ly) - Part 2 outlining 3 examples of SLI patterns that you will encounter as you embark on your SAFe implementation journey.

Nicole Bryan is VP of Product Management at Tasktop
Share this

Industry News

March 21, 2023

OpenText launched the latest version of ValueEdge -- an innovative modular, cloud-based DevOps and value stream management (VSM) platform.

March 21, 2023

Oracle announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the programming language and development platform.

March 21, 2023

Rafay Systems introduced Environment Manager, a solution that empowers enterprise platform teams to improve the developer experience by delivering self-service capabilities for provisioning full-stack environments.

March 20, 2023

To meet the growing demand for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) with global organizations, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing new capabilities that can boost the reliability and efficiency of large-scale Kubernetes environments while simplifying operations and reducing costs.

March 20, 2023

Perforce Software joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program and listed its free Enhanced Studio Pack (ESP) in AWS Marketplace.

March 20, 2023

Aembit, an identity platform that lets DevOps and Security teams discover, manage, enforce, and audit access between federated workloads, announced its official launch alongside $16.6M in seed financing from cybersecurity specialist investors Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures.

March 16, 2023

Hyland released Alfresco Content Services 7.0 – a cloud-native content services platform, optimized for content model flexibility and performance at scale.

March 16, 2023

CAST AI has announced the closing of a $20M investment round.

March 15, 2023

Check Point® Software Technologies introduced Infinity Global Services, an all-encompassing security solution that will empower organizations of all sizes to fortify their systems, from cloud to network to endpoint.

March 15, 2023

OpsCruise's Kubernetes and Cloud Service observability platform is certified to run on the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

March 14, 2023

DataOps.live released an update to the DataOps.live platform, delivering productivity for data teams.

March 14, 2023

CoreStack and Zensar announced a strategic global partnership. CoreStack will provide its AI-powered NextGen cloud governance and FinOps capabilities, complementing Zensar’s composable cloud operations offering.

March 14, 2023

Delinea introduced the Delinea Platform, a cloud-native foundation for Delinea's PAM solutions that empowers end-to-end visibility, dynamic privilege controls, and adaptive security.

March 13, 2023

Sysdig announced a new foundation that will serve as the long-term custodian of the Wireshark open source project.

March 13, 2023

Talend announced the latest update to Talend Data Fabric, its end-to-end platform for data discovery, transformation, governance, and sharing.