General SAFe trends

The adoption of SAFe and its market share are still growing.

The less flattering trends below come from anecdotal evidence. There is a growing number of Agile professionals and certified SAFe professionals that decided not to work again with clients adopting SAFe. They declared it publicly, it occasionally comes up at meetings among Agile professionals, and some recruiters reported candidates refusing job opportunities because of SAFe.

The number of experienced Agile professionals publicly criticising SAFe is also increasing.

There is a growing number of sr leaders and former employees of organisations that tried to adopt SAFe that are sharing stories of stalled and abandoned adoptions, adoptions that went wrong, and problems caused by SAFe.

The number and frequency of posts on social media and articles in online magazines about failed SAFe adoptions is also increasing.

More organisations are asking for Agile professionals that are framework agnostic, and that have enough experience to work without the need of a guardrail from a scaled framework.

It is not possible to say if these trends are ordinary by-products of the increasing adoptions of SAFe, if they are due to SAFe itself, the quality of its implementations, the characteristic of the organisations choosing that framework, or other factors.