Yves Hanoulle

When I first heard of SAFe, I was hearing the same kind of negative things as I heard when I first heard of Scrum. (From people doing XP) or Kanban (from people doing scrum). So I decided to look for a SAFe project to experience it myself. As I did not want to just have an opinion based on theory. After that project, my general feeling was: SAFe goes further than the companies implementing it want to go and does not go as far as what the companies really need. I saw that at best it was a gateway drug to agile. Yet in most companies, it just gives a new name to an old way of working. A nice example is dependencies, instead of making dependencies transparent to start working on removing them, they at best visualise them so show them as reality. I used to think it was nice they showed many different techniques to a large audience. Now I see that not only do they explain them badly and give practitioners a bad start with a new technique, but they also try to copyright techniques from agile friends. The sentence “this is not agile”, is not agile in itself, yet calling a cat a dog, does not make it bark.