Is SAFe the only way to scale agile?
I have found recently that people who lead SAFe teams assume that criticising SAFe means that you are rejecting all scaling, release planning and architecture. As if the only alternative to SAFe is single-team 2-week sprint planning with no design. I find this bizarre. We in the agile community know the need to plan releases and scale to programs and organisations. We think there are plenty of better ways to scale than SAFe, such as Agile Architecture, Disciplined Agile Delivery, Team Topologies, Unfix, Kanban planning, Agile roadmaps, Lean Startup, and systems thinking. If you treat SAFe as a pattern library, there are many good things you can use. We need to help the people doing the work tailor a solution to their situation and continually improve it, not install a new Agile bureaucracy.
We have three great podcast interviews with experts on SAFE on the No-nonsense Agile Podcast
