This is the multi-page printable view of this section. Click here to print.
Other Experts' Opinion
1 - Chris Matt
Chris Matts is an experienced Agile practitioner specialising in delivering trading and risk management systems in investment banks. He contributed to BDD with Daniel Terhorst-North, he developed Feature Injection practice and with Olav Maassen he introduced the concept of Real Options in Agile.
Chris highlights that the creators of SAFe have not engaged with the wider Agile community in the usual debate that challenges the new practices in a process that validates and improves them, and ultimately gives (or not) credibility. Chris adds that he is not aware of a single leader in the Agile Community that has endorsed SAFe.
As an example of the flaws of SAFe he mentions the definition of Epics in SAFe. And he also challenges the idea that SAFe could be a stepping stone to good Agile.
References:
2 - Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan is a Silicon Valley-based product executive with more than 20 years of experience with industry leaders including eBay, AOL, Netscape Communications and Hewlett-Packard.
Based on all Marty Cagan has read and heard, he says he would not want to work in a company using SAFe. He can’t either imagine any of the strong tech product companies he knows choosing to move to SAFe, and if for some reason they did, he’d be pretty certain their top talent would leave.
He believes that with SAFe the core benefits of Agile and Lean are lost. And he found in SAFe all ten key attributes of Waterfall and project mindset that are the most common root causes of product failure in product companies.
References:
3 - Mary Poppendieck
Mary Poppendieck, with her husband Tom Poppendieck, is the co-author of the book Lean Software Development, a seminal book for the Agile community.
She agrees with the overall conclusion of the U.S. Air Force memorandum which is to strongly discourage the use of rigid, prescriptive frameworks such as SAFe.
References:
4 - Dave Snowden
David John Snowden is a researcher in the field of knowledge management, and the creator of the Cynefin framework applied in software development and management science.
Overall he expressed a very negative view of SAFe. Among other comments, he explained that SAFe employs ordered world approaches to solve complex problems, and because of that it’s a-priori wrong. As a result, he adds, SAFe is a massive backwards not a forwards move.
References:
5 - Steve Denning
Steve Denning is a recognised expert and author in leadership, management, and innovation.
In some of his articles, he describes the efforts to scale Agile with SAFe as counterproductive. He further criticises SAFe stating that it destroys the very essence of Agile, and it degrades and undermines everything in Agile that is authentic and useful.
He added that SAFe gives to organisations a mandate to call themselves Agile while keep doing what they have always done, reaching the conclusion that SAFe is the epitome of fake Agile.
References:
6 - Barry W. Boehm
Barry W. Boehm was a prominent American software engineer and author of the COCOMO costing model and the Spiral Model software process.
He commented on the approach embraced by SAFe: “Tailoring-down all-inclusive methods lead to unnecessary expenses in time and resources”, and he adds that it’s the opposite of the Agile approach.
References:
- The original article with the quotes couldn’t be found, the search done concludes that the most probable source of the quotes is the book “Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed”