Book Image

Scaling Scrum Across Modern Enterprises

By : Cecil 'Gary' Rupp
Book Image

Scaling Scrum Across Modern Enterprises

By: Cecil 'Gary' Rupp

Overview of this book

Scaled Scrum and Lean-Agile practices provide essential strategies to address large and complex product development challenges not addressed in traditional Scrum. This Scrum/ Lean-Agile handbook provides a comprehensive review and analysis of industry-proven scaling strategies that enable business agility on an enterprise scale. Free of marketing hype or vendor bias, this book helps you decide which practices best fit your situation. You'll start with an introduction to Scrum as a lightweight software development framework and then explore common approaches to scaling it for more complex development scenarios. The book will then guide you through systems theory, lean development, and the application of holistic thinking to more complex software and system development activities. Throughout, you'll learn how to support multiple teams working in collaboration to develop large and complex products and explore how to manage cross-team integration, dependency, and synchronization issues. Later, you'll learn how to improve enterprise operational efficiency across value creation and value delivery activities, before discovering how to align product portfolio investments with corporate strategies. By the end of this Scrum book, you and your product teams will be able to get the most value out of Agile at scale, even in complex cyber-physical system development environments.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Scaling Lightweight Scrum into a Heavyweight Contender
8
Section 2: Comparative Review of Industry Scaled Agile Approaches
16
Section 3: Implementation Strategies

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...