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Agile Experts' Opinions
1 - Ron Jeffries
Ron Jeffries published on his personal website a very constructive, detailed long list of criticisms about SAFe. His criticisms have fallen on deaf ears, and instead, the latest versions of SAFe have even worsened the problems.
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2 - Andy Hunt
Andy Hunt states that SAFe is not an Agile approach. He also mentioned professionals that made a career fixing severe problems caused by failed SAFe adoptions.
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3 - Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler is also Chief Scientist in ThoughtWorks, so you can imagine that the view of ThoughtWorks on SAFe, also documented here, is congruent with his view.
During a panel at the GOTO conference, he made very clear his dislike for SAFe.
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4 - Alistair Cockburn
Alistair Cockburn suggested that the money and time spent on installing SAFe could produce much better results when spent instead on improving collaboration and delivery that in turn would move the company’s attitude and behaviour some distance.
He added at that point that he stopped defending SAFe because he thinks there is a better way to spend the money.
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5 - Brian Marick
Brian Marick described SAFe nature as problematic and prescriptive due to the set of rules to follow, with a fret to enforce them. And he also described SAFe processes as overly-codified to the point that they actively work against the collective creation of tacit knowledge.
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6 - Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are part of the group of authors of the Agile Manifesto and two of the creators of Scrum.
As mentioned before they both criticise SAFe.
Ken Schwaber equates SAFe to RUP, an abandoned heavyweight methodology. He comments further saying that a core premise of Agile is that the people doing the work are the people who can best figure out how to do it. And that the job of management is to do anything to help them do so, not suffocate them with SAFe.
Jeff Sutherland says that he finds scaling frameworks like SAFe overly prescriptive and limited in their efficacy.
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7 - Mike Beedle
Mike Beedle was an American theoretical physicist turned software engineer, and he was the author of the first book and earliest papers about Scrum. He was also a co-author and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto.
He debated that SAFe is not Agile, and he added that there are many other better alternatives. He articulated how SAFe in particular and the Agile Train Releases concept, violate all the values in the Agile Manifesto.
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