Talk:Scaled agile framework

Criticism, once again

If you look at https://safedelusion.com you can read what a great many number of people in the agile community think about SAFe. Also people having developed methods and practices that are being 'adopted' by SAfe. It's not pretty. How do we reflect the fact that the main experts within their fields of empiricism, whether design, scrum, or lean innovation, are extremely negative about SAFe? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MazSpork (talk • contribs) 20:27, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Not freely available?

I cannot find any substantiation of the claim that SAFe is made 'freely available'. The FAQ states that community access is granted only after taking a course, and I haven't found a free course offering. In addition, you can lose access. You must have attended a course recently, have an active certification, or purchase a membership. That doesn't meet any definition of 'freely available' that I'm aware of. I propose changing 'made freely available' to 'made available to to people who take courses, pay for membership, or maintain certifications through Scaled Agile Inc.' I'd also propose using the FAQ references I've used here. Or, an explanation (with references) of what is freely available and what isn't. --IntermediateValue (talk) 16:24, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

References

Criticism

@Cs02rm0: ignored my comments about not having criticism sections as laid-out in WP:NOCRIT and my claim that the sources should be reliable (not blogs) by reverting me and claiming it's "expert opinion". So Renee Troughton, author of the Agile Forest blog is an expert? She's trying to self-publish a book and can't get funding for it but she is a podcaster, and not everyone can do that. And Sean Dexter is a Product/UX Designer. I'm not sure that makes Sean an expert either. Please use only reliable sources and incorporate the criticism into the article. Walter Görlitz (talk) 21:39, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh, and I will consider taking the sources to WP:RSN for an official position if no one enters the discussion here. Walter Görlitz (talk) 21:40, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

I see that Andy Dingley, who has been stalking my edits, has decided that these sources and the section are valid. Walter Görlitz (talk) 22:33, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

I opened two discussions about the reliability of the sources and as I expected, neither were found to be reliable.

Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 287#Is a blogger an expert in Agile development?

Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 287#Is a member of "Agile Forest" an expert in the subject?

Based on that, the lack of discussion here, and the guidelines laid out above, I'm removing the content again. Walter Görlitz (talk) 15:32, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Doesn't seem completely neutral

SAFe definitely isn't without criticism [1][2], but this article hardly reflects that, limiting any mention of criticism to half a sentence in the introduction, while also asserting as fact that SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams and generally reading as promotional. I'm thinking of taking this article on, but I'd like to solicit thoughts and opinions before I start making edits. – ClockworkSoul 17:01, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I would tend to agree with you. I think part of the problem is that although large parts of the Agile community have a negative opinion of SAFe it is hard to find decent quality secondary sources covering this, a lot of the discussion is on blogs or social media.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EdkoKpURZREBOmArg4aopWTzOhvEPfCgTD-aLNMSTgg/edit# is a Google doc that's been doing the rounds recently, it's got a decent appendix of sources, I've not had a chance to go through them in detail to see which ones meet WP:RS but hopefully there's something of use there. JaggedHamster (talk) 18:47, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it's true: quality secondary sources are often a challenge. Are we sure we're applying WP:RS to the promotional (or at least curiously positively-leaning) statements? That's a genuine question: I haven't looked closely at the references. – ClockworkSoul 19:57, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

That's a good question. I had a look through them, here's some observations, I'd welcome a second opinion on them:

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/why-continuous-delivery-is-key-to-speeding-up-software-development-1282498 - Probably counts as a reliable secondary source per Wikipedia:Interviews but I'm not sure why we're using it at all, SAFe is only mentioned in passing and isn't the focus of the interview, there's surely a better source than this.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/01/disciplined-agile-delivery/ - Actually quite critical of SAFe, which we don't reflect where we use it in the article, but we should likely be treating it as a primary source. It's an interview with the creator of DAD and the mentions of SAFe are largely him advocating for why DAD is better.

"van Haaster, K (2014). Agile in-the-large: Getting from Paradox to Paradigm. Unpublished paper from Charles Sturt University." - We shouldn't be using an unpublished source, per WP:OR

"King, Michael (2017). "Serving Federal Customers with SAFe Concepts" - link is dead but https://web.archive.org/web/20171003030023/http://cmmiinstitute.com/sites/default/files/resource_asset/Serving%20Federal%20Customers%20Using%20Agile%2C%20SAFe%2C%20And%20CMMI%20Principles.pdf has it. It's a slide deck from a conference and largely repeats material from SAFe docs, it doesn't seem a great source to me.

https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/real-agile-means-everybody-is-agile/240159622 - article doesn't load for me but https://web.archive.org/web/20130811130539/https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/real-agile-means-everybody-is-agile/240159622 has it. This appears to be churnalism from a press release, see https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/versionone-extends-agile-collaboration-to-include-all-software-stakeholders-218489731.html. Per WP:PRSOURCE "Press releases cannot be used to support claims of notability and should be used cautiously for other assertions."

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/08/death-by-planning-agile/ - the only mention of SAFe I can see at that link is in a comment. The interview itself doesn't seem to support the content it's being used as a citation for.

Leffingwell, Dean (2007). Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises. - this is being used to support "...then first formally described in a 2007 book". Ideally we should be using a secondary source to support that this book was where it was first formally described, not just citing the book itself.

"Eklund, U; Olsson, H; Strøm, N (2014). Industrial challenges of scaling agile in mass-produced embedded systems. Agile Methods. Large-Scale Development, Refactoring, Testing, and Estimation" This is being used to support "Development teams typically refine their backlog up to two to three iterations ahead, but in larger organizations the product marketing team needs to plan further ahead for their commitments to market and discussions with customers." The paper doesn't support this as a general statement and shouldn't be being used as a source for it. It's specifically about the difficulties of adopting agile practices when developing firmware/hardware. Interestingly Section 4.2 in it does discuss SAFe and DAD but says "existing large-scale agile methodology frameworks such as these do not address the challenges particular to the embedded domain (identified by e.g. [27]), and especially not all system engineering challenges regarding large-scale manufacturing".

"Does DAD Know Best, Is it Better to do LeSS or Just be SAFe?" - is being used to support the statement "On large-scale developments, the organization wants a view across multiple team backlogs, such as provided by a product manager.". It's a reasonably nuanced article and doesn't support this as a general statement.

http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/answer/Scaling-Agile-development-calls-for-defined-practices-consultant-says - link redirects to some generic article now but is available via archive.org. It is being used to support "SAFe acknowledges that, at the scale of many tens or hundreds of development teams, it becomes increasingly chaotic for teams to fully self-organize". The relevant quote from the interview is "The challenge really comes in when you try to scale that up to a large organization, which requires a more prescriptive approach. When trying to get several hundred people working together and delivering value every two weeks, you have to put aside some small-Agile practices. It takes too long to set up, train and manage a large self-organizing team, for example. That process would entail so much churn and time that, somewhere along the line, the organization will lose faith in your ability do it.", I don't think our current summary of that is accurate. Also, the interview as a whole seems a primary source giving the interviewee's opinions, which is fine but we shouldn't be stating points from it as if they're neutral facts. JaggedHamster (talk) 11:22, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but what is Scaled agile framework

There is a lot of information in this article, such as the concepts it is based on. But there is no description of the actual framework. What are the ceremonies (if that's the right term)? What are the roles? What is the cadence? What are the artifacts? How about its processes? FreeFlow99 (talk) 14:29, 1 June 2023 (UTC)