SAFe Lesson 4: Building Solutions with Agile Product Delivery

Validate on Staging

3 Practices: maintain a staging environment, blue/green deployment, system demo

Trunk-based Development

A 'gated commit' ensures software has passed the gate (e.g. unit tested, performance tested, and free of known defects, etc.) before being checked into the main codebase or trunk. Code that passes the gate is automatically integrated into the trunk; which removes the complications of managing multiple branches. Helps to ensure the code can be reliably released on demand without the need for costly code freezes or hardening iterations.

Application Lifecycle Management

Application and Agile lifecycle management tools create a standardized environment for communication and collaboration between development teams and related groups.

Testing Automation

Automated testing tools include unit and acceptance testing, performance testing, and load testing.

Blue/Green Deployment

Blue/green deployment provides two environments, one live and one idle. To deploy, a switch is flipped, or a load balancer is updated, and the idle environment becomes the staging environment, while the other becomes the new idle environment. This enables quick transition and recovery where necessary.

Continuous Deployment Automation

CD tools automate application deployments through to the various environments. They facilitate rapid feedback and continuous delivery while providing the required audit trails, versioning, and approval tracking.

Continuous Integration Automation

CI tools automate the process of compiling code into a build after developers have checked their code into a central repository. After the CI server builds the system, it runs unit and integration tests, reports results, and typically releases a labeled version of deployable artifacts.

Story Map

Capturing features that represent a workflow; organize a sequence of stories according to the tasks a user needs to accomplish their goal; enable teams to understand how the stories in the team backlog support user objective; clarify the relationships between quality and value

SAFe DevOps Health Radar

Continuous Exploration: hypothesize, collaborate & research, architect, synthesize Continuous Integration: develop, build, test end-to-end, stage Continuous Deployment: deploy, verify, monitor, respond Release on Demand: release, stabilize, measure, learn

Customer Centricity and Design Thinking

Customer centricity puts the customer at the center of every decision and uses design thinking to ensure the solution is desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable.

Seven practices contribute to the ability to deploy

Dark launches, feature toggles, deployment automation, selective deployment, self-service deployment, version control, blue/green deployment

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline creates the foundation that enables Enterprises to release value, in whole or in part, at any time to meet customer and market demand.

Develop on Cadence; Release on Demand

Developing on cadence helps manage the variability inherent in product development. Decoupling the release of value assures customers can get what they need when they need it.

Service Virtualization

Different kinds of testing require different environments. Service virtualizations allow teams to simulate a production environment without the costs and effort associated with creating and managing real environments.

Analyzing

Features that best align with the vision are pulled into the analyzing step for further exploration.

End-to-end System Testing

Five practices: test and production environment congruence, test automation, test data management, service virtualization, test nonfunctional requirements, continuous integration with suppliers

Customer Centricity motivates teams to

Focus on the customer, understand the customer's needs, think and feel like the customer, build whole product solutions, create customer lifetime value

Kanban Series of States

Funnel, Analyzing, Program Backlog, Implementing, Validating on Staging, Deploying to Production, Releasing, Done

Time Criticality

How does the user/business value decay over time? Is there a fixed deadline? Will they wait for us or move to another solution? Are there Milestones on the critical path impacted by this? What is the current effect on customer satisfaction?

Why Customer-centric?

It helps deliver the whole product solution from a holistic perspective; greater profits; increased employee engagements; more satisfied customers

Benefit Hypothesis

Justifies feature implementation cost and provides business perspective when making scope decisions

Successful PI Planning

Organizational readiness (planning scope and context, business alignment, agile teams), Content readiness (executive briefing, product vision briefing, architecture vision briefing), Logistics readiness (locations, technology and tooling, communication channels)

3 Aspects of Inspect and Adapt Workshop

PI System Demo, Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement, Problem-Solving Workshop

Story Point

Represents volume, complexity, knowledge, uncertainty

ROAM (Program Risks)

Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated

SMART PI Objective

Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound

Team Breakout #2

Teams continue planning based on their agenda from the previous day, making the appropriate adjustments. They finalize their objectives for the PI, to which the Business Owners assign business value

Recover - Enable Low-Risk Releases

Techniques: stop-the-line mentality so everyone swarms to fix any problems until it is resolved; plan for and rehearse failures; build the environment and capability to fix forward or roll back

Process Time

The time it takes to get work done in one step of the CI/CD pipeline

Committed PI Objectives

These business and technical goals for each team, with agreement and value assigned by the Business Owners, guide the team's work for the next program increment.

Program Board

This is a "visual radiator" of the new feature delivery dates, feature dependencies among teams and with other ARTs, and relevant Milestones

Funnel

This is the capture state for all new features or enhancement of existing system features.

Test data management

To create stability, tests must be consistent and realistic, replicating production as much as possible, and under source control.

How Customers Derive Value

Two primary means by which a customer derives value from products and solutions, 1) reducing their costs and 2) increasing their revenue Secondary aspects of value derivation include such things as brand value, and the alignment of values between the customer and the enterprise

Acceptance Criteria

Typically defined during the Program Backlog refinement

Cost of Delay

User-Business Value + Time Criticality + Risk Reduction and/or Opportunity Enablement

Risk Reduction-Opportunity Enablement Value

What else does this do for our business? Does it reduce the risk of this or a future delivery? Is there value in the information we will receive? Will this feature enable new business opportunities?

User-Business Value

What is the relative value to the customer or business? Do our users prefer this over that? What is the revenue impact on our business? Is there a potential penalty or other negative impact if we delay?

Epics

a container for a significant Solution development initiative that captures the more substantial investments that occur within a portfolio. Due to their considerable scope and impact, epics require the definition of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and approval by Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) before implementation.

Agile Product Delivery

a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users; 3 Dimensions: Customer Centricity / Design Thinking, Develop on Cadence / Release on Demand, DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Design Thinking

a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle; it emphasizes understanding the problem to be solved, the context in which the solution will be used, and the evolution of that solution. Steps: Understand the Problem, Design the right solution, Sustain (Viable, Feasible, Desirable)

Empathy Map

a design thinking tool that promote customer identification by helping teams develop deep, shared understanding for others; they help teams imagine what a specific persona is thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing as they use the product.

Prototype

a functional model of the Feature or Product we wish to build. It helps the design team clarify their understanding of the problem and reduces risk in developing a solution. Benefits: Fast feedback, risk reduction, intellectual property / patent filing, models for requirements Types: paper (usually best choice), mid-fi, hi-fi, hardware

Customer Centricity

a mindset and a way of doing business that focuses on creating positive experiences for the customer through the full set of products and services that the enterprise offers; generate greater profits, increased employee engagement, and more satisfied customers; Customer-centric businesses create greater profits, increase employee engagement, and more thoroughly satisfy customer needs. Customer-centric governments and nonprofits create resilience, sustainability, and the alignment needed to fulfill their mission.

DevOps

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; seamlessly defines, implements, and delivers solution elements to the end user, without handoffs or excessive external production or operations support. It includes not just development and operations but everyone needed to release value, such as security, compliance, audit, marketing, legal and others. The goal: to improve collaboration across the value stream by developing and automating a continuous delivery pipeline Benefits: 208x more frequent deploy frequency, 106x faster lead time, 2604x faster time to restore service, 7x lower change fail rate

Market Event

a one-time future event, which has a high probability of materially affecting one or more solutions

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

a prioritization model used to sequence jobs (eg., Features, Capabilities, and Epics) to produce maximum economic benefit. In SAFe, WSJF is estimated as the Cost of Delay (CoD) divided by job size; highest priority = highest WSJF

Solution Train Engineer

a servant leader and coach for the Solution Train, facilitating and guiding the work across all ARTs and Suppliers in the Value Stream.

Market Rhythm

a set of events that occur repeatedly on a predictable cadence.

Business Owner

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); participate in mission setting, planning, draft plan reviews, conducting management reviews, and problem-solving during PI planning; assign business value to Team PI Objectives and approve the PI plan

Program Predictability Measure

actual business value achieved to planned business value.

DevOps Tool Chain

application lifecycle management, build, test, continuous integration, artifact management repository, continuous deployment

Inspect and Adapt

are held at the end of each Program Increment (PI). It provides the entire ART with an opportunity to identify process improvement via a structured, problem-solving workshop.

Enabler Stories

capture system, architecture, or infrastructure requirements, such as building improvements to support the continuous delivery pipeline.

Rolled Percent Complete and Accurate

captures the likelihood that an item will pass through the entire workflow without rework

System Demos

conducted at the end of every iteration and provide an integrated view of new Features for the most recent iteration. Each demo gives ART stakeholders an objective measure of progress for the current increment. By providing opportunities for real-time adjustments, a system demo is a critical event that enables Business Agility.

5 practices to help build the solution

continuous code integration, build and test automation, trunk-based development, gated commit, application security

Architecture Runway

existing code, hardware components, marketing branding guidelines, etc. that enable near-term business Features; enablers build up the runway; features consume it; must be continuously maintained; use capacity allocation for enablers that extend the runway

Buyer Personas

extend design thinking to include the individuals and organizations that authorize purchasing decisions. They help ensure that the design encompasses the whole product purchase experience, including after-sales service, support, and operations.

Personas

fictional consumers and/or users derived from customer research; the different people who might use a product or solution in a similar way, providing insights into how real users would engage with a solution.

Innovation Accounting

focuses on how to measure the intermediate and predictive business outcomes of the hypothesis during initial incremental solution development and evaluation of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

Define Phase

focuses on the information gathered during the discover phase, using convergent techniques to generate insights into the specific problems and/or unmet needs.

Augmented Product

goes beyond what is expected and enables competitors to differentiate their offerings

Deep and Narrow Solutions

has a small number of customers that will often pay a significant amount of money for these products and services

Scrum of Scrums

helps coordinate the dependencies of the ARTs and provides visibility into progress and impediments. The RTE, representatives from each team (often the Scrum Master), and others (where appropriate) meet to review their progress toward milestones and PI objectives, and dependencies among the teams

Solution Context

identifies critical aspects of the operational environment for a Solution. It provides an essential understanding of requirements, usage, installation, operation, and support of the solution itself. Solution context heavily influences opportunities and constraints for releasing on demand.

Customer Journey Map

illustrates the experience as a user engages with a company's operational value stream, products, and services. Journey maps are powerful design thinking tools for operational Value Streams. They allow teams to identify ways in which the specific deliverables of one or more Development Value Streams can be improved to create a better end-to-end experience.

Enabling a Culture of Continuous Integration

integrate often, make integration results visible, fixing failed integrations is a top priority, establish common cadence, develop and maintain proper infrastructure, apply supportive software engineering practices

Release Train Engineer

is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). The RTE's major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement.

Innovation and Planning

iterations offer an opportunity in every PI for teams to work on innovation activities that are difficult to fit into a continuous, incremental value delivery pattern.

Empathetic Design

our ability to put aside our preconceived ideas and develop solutions from the perspective of our customers.

Built-in Quality

prescribes practices around flow, architecture & design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality.

Deliver Phase

produces artifacts that are suitable for creating the solution and vary based on context. They often start as prototypes that are expressed as a validated set of Features in the Program Backlog for ongoing delivery through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

Pull Event

pulls together various aspects of the solution and helps ensure that the ARTs and suppliers are creating an integrated and tested solution, fit for its intended purpose

Potential Product

represents everything that might be done to attract and keep customers

Expected Product

represents the customer's minimal purchase conditions as informed by alternative or competing products

Discover Phase

seeks to understand the problem by engaging in market and user research to identify unmet needs

Multi-Segment Solutions

serve disparate market segments in which each segment uses the solution in slightly different ways. In this situation, customer centricity means understanding the unique needs of each segment even if the solution serves multiple segments.

Agile Product Management

serves as the central coordinating function for bringing new solutions to market while also ensuring the ongoing success of existing products.

Program Increment Planning

serves as the heartbeat of the ART, aligning all its teams to a shared mission and vision. Architecture/Engineering and UX work as intermediaries for governance, interfaces and dependencies; includes all members of the ART and occurs within the Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration. Inputs: business context, roadmap and vision, top 10 features of the Program Backlog Outputs: Committed PI objectives, program board

DevSecOps

shifts security practices left; during continuous exploration, perform threat modeling to identify potential security threats based on solution design; ensure backlogs and NFRs reflect security requirements; security test and tools automatically identify security vulnerabilities during integration (and possibly after deployment); security as code + penetration tests help prevent known vulns from getting into prod; after release, security monitoring watches for breaches + attacks against vulns

Team Breakout #1

teams estimate their capacity for each Iteration and identify the backlog items they will likely need to realize the features. Each team creates their draft plans, visible to all, iteration by iteration.

Draft Plan Review

teams present key planning outputs, which include capacity and load, draft PI objectives, potential risks, and dependencies. Business Owners, Product Management, and other teams and stakeholders review and provide input.

Generic Product

the "minimal offering" of a product.

Program Backlog

the holding area for upcoming Features that will address user needs and deliver business benefits for a single Agile Release Train (ART)

Percent Complete and Accurate

the percentage of work that the next step in the CI/CD pipeline can process without needing rework

User Stories

the primary means of expressing needed functionality. They can be written in a role format or a persona format

Application telemetry

the primary mechanism that acquires and then uses application data to help determine the results of relevant hypotheses.

Continuous Integration

the process of taking features from the Program Backlog and developing, testing, integrating, and validating them in a staging environment where they are ready for deployment and release. 4 Activities: Develop and implement stories, Build deployable binaries and merge the development branch, test end-to-end, stage by hosting and validating the solution in the staging environment

Release on Demand

the process that deploys new functionality into production and releases it immediately or incrementally to customers based on demand. 4 Activities: release, stabilize and operate, measure, learn 4 Practices: dark launches, feature toggles, canary releases, decoupled release elements

Continuous Exploration

the process that drives innovation and fosters alignment on what should be built by continually exploring market and customer needs, and defining a Vision, Roadmap, and set of Features for a Solution that addresses those needs; new ideas are raised, refined, and prepared as a list of prioritized features in the Program Backlog Steps: Hypothesize, collaborate & research, architect, synthesize

Continuous Deployment

the process that takes validated Features in a staging environment and deploys them into the production environment, where they are readied for release. Promotes design thinking / flow of value by: targeting functionality to specific customers, promoting experimentation (such as A/B testing), promotes small batches, releasing on business needs 4 Activities: deploy to production, verify the solution, monitor for problems, respond and recover

Solution Intent

the repository for storing, managing, and communicating the knowledge of current and intended Solution behavior. Where required, this includes both fixed and variable specifications and designs; reference to applicable standards, system models, and functional and nonfunctional tests; and traceability.

Solution Intent

the repository for storing, managing, and communicating the knowledge of current and intended Solution behavior. Where required, this includes both fixed and variable specifications and designs; reference to applicable standards, system models, and functional and nonfunctional tests; and traceability; the basic understanding of the current and evolving requirements, design, and intent; what exactly is this thing we are building? how are we going to build it?

Lead Time

the time it takes from when the work was done in the previous step of the CI/CD pipeline until it's done in the current step

Delay Time

the time when no work is happening

Build Automation

used to script or automate the process of compiling source code into binary code.

Develop Phase

uses journey mapping, story mapping, and prototyping to design potential solutions to problems quickly and cost-effectively

Features and Benefit Matrix

using short phrases that provide context and a hypothesis of the benefits that the user experiences; talk about 'Benefit-Feature' as this helps promote considering the different features that can provide the desired benefit

Solution Demo

where the results of development efforts from the Solution Train are integrated, evaluated, and made visible to Customers and other stakeholders; where the results of the combined development efforts of multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs)—along with the contributions from Suppliers and other solution participants—are shown to customers and other stakeholders; 'pull event'