Achieve the Full Potential of SAFe with Effective Release Management
0 likes103 views
The document discusses how the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) can help enterprises overcome challenges of multi-speed IT environments through effective release management. SAFe uses Agile Release Trains (ARTs) consisting of multiple Agile teams working together on integrated software releases. Effective release management is needed to coordinate dependencies between multiple ARTs. Plutora Release management software provides metrics and dashboards to improve visibility across ARTs and ensure high quality, on-time software deliveries that realize the full benefits of SAFe.
Achieve the Full Potential of SAFe with Effective Release Management
- 1. Achieve the Full Potential of SAFe with Effective Release Management Enterprise software teams often operate at different speeds depending on the application and infrastructure. Some teams use Agile, others use Waterfall, and still other teams use a combination of the two. This multi-speed IT adds to the complexity of enterprise releases. IT teams can cope by using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) coupled with effective release management.
- 2. They are nimble and dynamic enough to rapidly create software from the ground up or quickly iterate and deploy new features onto an existing platform. Not so in most enterprises. When development teams in an enterprise create applications, they might find themselves interacting with systems of record. Agile does not play nicely with these systems. This bodes ill for applications whose shiny frontends conceal a backend that resembles MS DOS. Agile teams working on the newer component will create at their usual breakneck speed, while the teams that are assigned to the older systems will plug away at Waterfall speed. Creating features for systems of record will take a long time, and integrating those features will take longer still. In the meantime, the Agile teams who’ve already finished their portion of the work will be left sitting on their hands. That’s multi-speed IT in a nutshell. At enterprise scale, there’s a lot that goes into managing all of this to ensure smooth software delivery. For dev teams that are working with entirely new technology, Agile is king.
- 3. As an enterprise company battling with multi-speed IT, you don’t want to lose the advantages of Agile. The Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe can help you overcome that challenge. Note: SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc. What’s the best way to solve it?
- 4. What is it? According to Scaled Agile, the company that designed the framework, SAFe empowers complex organizations to achieve the benefits of Lean-Agile software and systems development at scale. Launched in 2011, SAFe has helped hundreds of the world’s largest organizations achieve: • Faster time-to-market. • Dramatic increases in productivity and quality. • More motivated and engaged employees. How it works The intention of SAFe is to make up for the shortcomings of Agile that emerge when dealing with legacy software. Its key functional unit, the Agile Release Train (ART), enforces a holistic approach. Instead of isolated teams working on individual features, each train works together to create a working, integrated piece of software. ARTs are typically made of up five to twelve Agile teams. Each ART knows the start date of their project. They know the release date, and they know how much work and which specific goals they need to hit in between those two dates. This is a ten-week increment by default. At the end, the train delivers production software with integrated features—a Program Increment (PI). Along the train’s journey, there are several different “stations,” representing, for example, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, and staging. If a team’s feature isn’t ready by the time they arrive at one of these stations, then they don’t get to stay on the train. Their feature will not get included in the PI and will have to wait until the next increment is delivered. In SAFe, a feature is done when it is written, tested, and proven to work in production. By delaying features that don’t meet this definition, SAFe ensures that trains deliver PIs with consistent levels of quality across the board. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- 5. With manual data collection there’s a big opportunity for error and uncertainty to creep into the development process. In the worst-case scenario, individual teams within an ART may lose sight of application quality. Agile Release Trains require effective release management Managing a single train may be relatively easy, but this single train may have dependencies which connect to other ongoing projects. That’s why, to achieve even greater efficiencies, SAFe requires coordinated release management where multiple projects and multiple trains are involved. Multiple ARTs are managed via vast Portfolio Epics: design documents that capture the entire scope and scale of a particular project. But customer expectations are a moving target — the scope and scale of a Portfolio Epic may diverge from the finished production software. Due to the sheer scale of an Epic, it may be difficult to assess how progress is being made on the development of its capabilities or features. Thus, SAFe instructs Epic Owners to assess progress based on certain metrics, such as feature cycle time, team self-assessments, releases per year, and so on. Epic Owners might stumble in the collection and interpretation of these metrics. Attempts to coordinate the efforts of multiple ARTs and assess their progress usually take the form of a massive two-day meeting. Individual Release Train Engineers will come forward with self-reported quality and deliverable metrics. Methods for capturing and storing these metrics might include whiteboards and spreadsheets. This is inadequate for complete visibility.
- 6. Reap the benefits of SAFe with Plutora Release Plutora allows Release Train Engineers or RTEs to sense problems within the release and correct them before they become irreversible. Teams using Plutora Release will benefit from a real-time status and risk profile of the project. Live visibility drives collaboration and prevents problems from occurring, particularly when there are dependencies within the project. Plutora Release provides several dashboards that display metrics from within trains, and across each train, allowing each stakeholder to have a detailed view of metrics across the entire project. This results in a higher-quality PI overall, which arrives with more of its features intact, further solidifying productivity gains from SAFe. When used in conjunction with Plutora Environments, Plutora Release can be set up to “gate” features that enter a PI and Plutora Environments can ensure that environment conflicts and contention are avoided, ensuring that releases pass through the correct quality processes with the highest level of quality. Features that don’t pass testing can be removed from the PI to reduce schedule risk. RTEs can trace the ripple effect of change across the ART and auto-sync updated scope to dev tools to keep teams aligned. 1 2 3 4
- 7. SAFe represents an amazing way for enterprises to adopt the speed and high-quality output of Agile, even if they don’t happen to be dealing with green-field projects. Release management aligns with SAFe in a way that delivers improved visibility and governance. This allows SAFe to fully live up to its potential as a design philosophy that solves multi-speed IT and helps deliver business-critical objectives.