SAFe and Atlassian

[#1]

What is SAFe?

All of us know Agile approach that is a great approach to manage single team work and allows team to unleash his potential. In a complex perspective, a product that is a composition of different components managed by different teams, agile approach need to be scaled at an enterprise context focusing not only at delivery perspective.

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe^®) is a set of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale. 

The following slide clarifies all the aspect of agile in an enterprise context.

Product Delivery in an enterprise context

When multiple teams work on different components that are part of a product, the main problem is to plan, coordinate and manage release across multiple team. Moreover, team commitment and general overview is not so simple to put in place.

Safe explains us to manage all these aspects in an ideal world.

SAFe and Atlassian

JIRA Software, Advanced Roadmap and Confluence, in my experience, provide us all the necessary instruments to manage agile approach. I’d like to have your point of view about how to use Atlassian tools for SAFe approach.

I read the following interesting article https://www.atlassian.com/dam/jcr:7b651b0f-1c44-4a88-8f9f-740d515136ac/SAFe_whitepaper.pdf and I like to know your experience in that context.

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

Interesting article, but for some organizations, Jira Software, Advanced Roadmaps, and Confluence are not enough, especially if you're looking at levels higher than the Agile Release Train (team of teams).

Atlassian themselves recognized this when they bought AgileCraft to release Jira Align.

[Karin van Driel]

I agree that Jira Align is very nice for SAFe, but now that we have Advanced Roadmaps in Jira and also (almost) the ability to rename Epic to Feature, a lot of the functionality in Align may be superfluous, or could at least be considered whether it is worth it at the significant price tag it adds. We're moving away from SAFe, to a more custom Agile at Scale way of working, so that may also be contributing to our decision to try using just Jira, without Align. It is working quite well for us. We still have a project for each team and then a project above that for our 'Team of Teams', where the teams pull work from. This structure seems to be working well for us. We then roll up into programs and Initiatives above that.

[Summer Hogan]

I agree with @Robert Wen_Cprime_ that Jira Software, Advanced Roadmaps, and Confluence are not enough to effectively implement and work within a SAFe environment. We just implemented Jira Align and it is working so far for our needs, although it is cumbersome to use. I tend to still use Jira mostly and hope that the integration works to send things to Align, but I really should start using it more and give it more of a chance.