Building on Essential SAFe
At the very beginning of this chapter, you learned that SAFe is a Lean-Agile approach for developing large-scale products and solutions. That is a true statement beginning out of the gate with the first level of configuration, Essential SAFe.
SAFe implements four configurations that guide different levels of implementation. These four configurations are Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe. We'll start with the introduction to Essential SAFe, as shown pictorially in Figure 12.5.
Essential SAFe is the most basic configuration of SAFe and includes a minimal set of roles, events, and artifacts required to deliver value at scale. As with other Scrum-based practices, SAFe incorporates the use of small Agile teams to reduce the issues of complexity that arise with increasing numbers of active participants.
However, since SAFe is an approach to implement Agile practices at scale, the Essential SAFe configuration introduces...