Book Image

SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners

By : Robert Wen
Book Image

SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners

By: Robert Wen

Overview of this book

Product development and release faces overlapping challenges due to the combined pressure of delivering high-quality products in shorter time-to-market cycles, along with maintaining proper operation and ensuring security in a complex high-tech environment. This calls for new ways of overcoming these challenges from design to development, to release, and beyond. SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners helps you use a DevOps approach with the Scaled Agile Framework and details how value streams help you resolve these challenges using examples and use cases. The book begins by explaining how the CALMR approach makes DevOps effective in resolving product development roadblocks. Next, you’ll learn to apply value stream management to establish a value stream that enables product development flow, measure its effectiveness through appropriate feedback loops, and find ways of improving it. Finally, you’ll get to grips with implementing a continuous delivery pipeline that optimizes the value stream through four phases during release on demand. This book complements the latest SAFe DevOps courses, and you’ll find it useful while studying for the SAFe DevOps Practitioner (SDP) certification. By the end of this DevOps book, you’ll have gained a clear understanding of how to achieve continuous execution and release on demand using DevOps and SAFe.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Part 1 Approach – A Look at DevOps and SAFe® through CALMR
8
Part 2:Implement – Moving Toward Value Streams
12
Part 3:Optimize – Enabling a Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Measurements in SAFe

When looking at an organization’s value streams realized as ARTs, Scaled Agile recommends viewing their performance in terms of these three following aspects:

  • Outcomes
  • Flow
  • Competency

Let’s see how these three aspects are measured in SAFe.

Measuring outcomes in SAFe

The primary mechanism for measuring outcomes comes from establishing and measuring value stream KPIs.

We saw KPI frameworks for measuring customer outcomes, such as Pirate (ARRRR) metrics and Fit-for-Purpose metrics, in Chapter 5, Measuring the Process and Solution. Determining the set of KPIs for your team or ART was discussed earlier in this chapter.

Validating the benefit hypothesis that comes from Epics, large pieces of work, may lead to desirable outcomes. Epic development is done experimentally by creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and using leading indicators to measure the hypothesized value. Closely monitoring the leading indicators produces...