A small significant sample of former SAFe experts, some instrumental in shaping SAFe.
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Comments from the authors of some practices assimilated by SAFe
1 - Jeff Gothelf
co-creator of Lean UX
Jeff Gothelf is the co-creator and co-author of Lean UX. He has direct experience with SAFe and indirect experience with several clients.
Commenting on how SAFe and Lean UX works together he says “all the principles we’ve built into Lean UX don’t seem to exist in SAFe.”
Based on what his clients are being taught by their SAFe trainers/consultants they are unable to see how SAFe and Lean UX can mix together. Neither does he have any good answers for them, since deviating from the framework is considered heresy in most cases.
References:
2 - Dave Farley
Dave Farley is a pioneer of Continuous Delivery, an expert in DevOps, and co-author of the first and most relevant book on Continuous Delivery.
After working with several clients that have adopted it, he noted that SAFe Release Trains practice is anti-Continuous Integration where Continuous Integration is a fundamental technical practice of Agile that Continuous Delivery is built on. That means that Release Trains in SAFe are anti-Continuous Delivery.
References:
3 - Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
co-creators of Scrum
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are two of the creators of the Scrum, and co-authors of The Scrum Guide. They are also part of the group of authors of the Agile Manifesto.
They both criticise SAFe, as detailed later in the document.
Jeff Sutherland in particular says that SAFe is inconsistent with the Scrum guide and codifies dysfunctions that can cripple teams for years.
Ken Schwaber says that there is a fundamental philosophical schism between Scrum and SAFe because Scrum controls risk through empiricism while SAFe tries to control risk through predictability.
References:
4 - Conclusions
This is a small sample of authors of original practices that have been integrated into SAFe, who say the integration of their practices is fundamentally flawed.
A larger number of experts share similar comments about other practices that have been integrated into SAFe.