In our article Agile 101—What is Agile development and why do you need it?, we looked at the Agile Development 2.0 application on the ServiceNow platform, and how it can help you implement an Agile software development framework for your software development lifecycle.
But what if you need to scale your development efforts on a larger scale—larger products, more teams, and longer timeframes—while stilll applying lean and agile practices? That's where the Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, comes in.
Note: SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.
In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we look at how the SAFe Framework and the ITBM SAFe application can augment Agile to help you develop and deliver large-scale software development projects.
Watch our video for a broad overview, and then read on for key points from the video.
How does SAFe augment what's already provided with Agile?
Level of perspective
At the Team level, SAFe is basically the same as Agile (the bottom half of the diagram below). SAFe adds a higher level, the Program level (the top half of the diagram), to bring product management, business owners, and customers into the picture, and to extend the development timeframe over multiple product releases.
In the SAFe application
You can see these two levels in the ITBM SAFe application. At the Team level, the SAFe application is a lot like the Agile application, with the backlog of stories awaiting assignment to a sprint, the sprint planning board to assign stories to sprints, and the sprint tracking board to monitor the progress of individual stories.
The Agile Release Train, or ART, level has similar boards for Program-level features – the backlog of product features in a release awaiting assignment to a program increment (PI), the PI planning board where features are assigned to PIs, plus a Big Room planning board to plan the execution of the stories in a feature by assigning them to sprints and development teams.
Program features are typically prioritized using a factor called weighted shorted job first, or WSJF, which reflects the value of implementing the feature quickly. This factor is based on four quantities you define for each feature: the value to the user, plus the value to your business (in terms of risk reduction or opportunity enablement), plus the urgency, all divided by the duration of the development effort.
Once you’ve assigned stories to sprints, your development teams will implement the sprints using the same Scrum practices as in Agile.
How do I get SAFe?
The Scaled Agile Framework plugin (com.sn_sdlc.safe) requires a separate subscription, and is activated by ServiceNow personnel.
How do users access SAFe in the platform?
Product managers and teams can access the SAFe Board by navigating to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) > SAFe Board, and selecting their respective levels.
For more information:
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) (product documentation)
Agile/SAFe video playlist (NOWsupport YouTube channel)
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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We’ve found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you’d like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below. To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.
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