Renee, Craig and Tony (with a lurking Em Campbell-Pretty) in a very busy corridor with random bells ringing, catch up with Dean Leffingwell, author of numerous books including “Agile Software Requirements” and “Scaling Software Agility” and the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in a very candid discussion:

• the journey to SAFe included as a developer building the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ride and infusion pumps and generally a mission to make quality better
• epiphony around Agile was the step change around how teams perform and how they like their work when they perform better
• not everything that is old is stupid, “we are discovering new ways of developing software” and we need to ask ourselves are we still discovering
• Scrum is the only method that defines what a software team is (roles and size)
• SAFe is not a war it is a mission to improve outcomes
• need to provide leadership to agile learning, SAFe is a body of knowledge and a set of patterns that helps simplify learning
• the differing viewpoints on SAFe are because the stakes have gotten higher, Agile is a big business and hence other approaches need to defend their turf because we are in a competitive market
• they don’t defend SAFe – we publish case studies, talk about it and implement it, we have to take the pragmatic approach to help people succeed
• SAFe is versioned because we record the best knowledge we have at the time and Dean is an author, but it has also allowed change management
• SAFe will always support two versions in the market, including courseware and the big picture, the blog is kept fully up-to-date
• SAFe LSE was a fork for SAFe for Lean, Software and Systems Engineering and allows for innovation, most of it has been collapsed back to the main framework
• the framework is free (and will remain so)

TheAgileRevolution-108 (30 minutes)