SAFe entities
Summarize
Summary of SAFe entities
This content explains key entities within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) relevant for planning, tracking, and delivering software products. Understanding these entities helps ServiceNow customers structure their work, prioritize tasks, and align teams effectively for scaled agile delivery.
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Key Entities
- Epic: The largest unit of work capturing business hypotheses and objectives, such as customer requests or business requirements. Epics span multiple program increments and are prioritized using WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) to maximize business value. Epics are decomposed into features for delivery by Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
- Feature: Comparable to an epic in Agile Development but smaller, features are sized to complete within a program increment (PI). Features are prioritized within an ART backlog and broken down into user stories for team-level implementation.
- Story: A user-centric, brief statement of a product requirement or business case that can be completed within a sprint. Effort is estimated in story points, reflecting relative effort rather than absolute time, aiding teams in planning and workload balancing.
- Agile Release Train (ART): A collection of agile teams working in concert towards a single solution, coordinating their efforts through program increments.
- Program Increment (PI): A fixed timebox (typically 8–12 weeks) during which ART teams collaborate to deliver incremental value. A PI usually consists of four development sprints followed by one innovation and planning sprint.
- SAFe Team: An autonomous, cross-functional team with diverse skills working collaboratively to achieve common goals. Users with appropriate roles can create teams, assign work items (stories, features, epics), and manage team membership. Team membership management can be restricted to system administrators if desired.
- Sprint: Subdivision of a program increment, measured in weeks, where teams deliver specific increments of work.
Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers
- Create Epics to define large business initiatives and progressively break them into Features and Stories for manageable delivery.
- Organize teams into Agile Release Trains to coordinate work across multiple teams towards a unified solution.
- Plan work in fixed Program Increments aligned with business goals, enabling predictable delivery cycles.
- Use roles such as
safescrummasterorsafeartuserto manage SAFe teams and their membership effectively. - Leverage SAFe entities and their hierarchical relationships within ServiceNow to track progress, prioritize work using WSJF, and ensure alignment across teams and programs.
Learn about the various SAFe entities that are used to successfully plan, track, and deliver your software products.
- Epic
Epic in SAFe is the largest unit of work, which can be continuously worked through multiple program increments. Epic captures business hypotheses. It is prioritized and assessed using the WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) score, which prioritizes and sequences jobs to produce optimum business value.
An epic is further decomposed into features for implementation and delivery by SAFe ARTs.
- Feature
A SAFe feature is equivalent to an epic in Agile Development. It must be small enough for completion within a program increment cycle. It is prioritized and sequenced in an ART backlog based on its global ranking. A feature is further decomposed into user stories for implementation and delivery by SAFe teams.
- Story
A SAFe story is a brief statement encapsulating a product requirement or business case written in user-centric language. A story must be small enough for completion in one sprint. The estimated effort required to complete a story is measured in story points. More points are assigned to a story requiring more effort. Story points are arbitrary measurements of the effort (not necessarily the time) required to complete a story, based on the estimates from the SAFe team members.
- Agile Release Train
Agile Release Train (ART) comprises a set of teams working towards a single solution.
- Program Increment
A program increment is set period during which teams in an ART collaborate and produce to achieve agreed-upon goals. A program increment in SAFe is similar to a sprint in Agile Development, typically spanning 8–12 weeks. The most common form of program increment comprises four development sprints followed by one innovation and planning sprint.
- SAFe team
SAFe team is an autonomous, cross-functional team containing members possessing different skill-sets who work in collaboration to achieve a common goal.
A user with the safe_scrum_master or safe_art_user role can create a SAFe team. You can assign these teams to SAFe work items such as stories, epics, and features.
Once a SAFe team is created, you can add members to it.- New customers: System administrator can add members to the team.
- Existing customers: A user with the safe_scrum_master or safe_art_user role can
add members to your SAFe team.Note:
You can restrict this function just to the system administrator by creating the safe.disallow_scrum_add_group_member property and setting it to true.
For information on how to create a property, see Add a system property.
- Sprint
Program Increments in SAFe are further segmented into sprints for teams involved in it, and are measured in terms of weeks.