
Ask HN: Who uses SAFe? Do you find it useful? - wierdstuff
In a recent thread, I noticed a sub-thread about SAFe (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaledagileframework.com).  I work at a large organization and my division recently adopted SAFe.  I find that it offers nothing original, costs our teams a lot of time on process overhead, neglects improving our engineering practices, and feels like Agile-on-steroids, which seems to me to be the antithesis of the Agile Manifesto.<p>Should I give SAFe a chance?  Do any successful technology or other companies benefit from SAFe?
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frogperson
I consulted at a SAFe shop for nearly 2 years. It was nearly unanimously hated
by engineers. It was very process heavy. PI planning took 2 full days every
two weeks.

Imagine the cost of 200 engineers and managers in a large room for 2 full
days. Most of them are not paying attention. It was hilarious that we would
spend 2 days every couple weeks talking about how we could be more productive.

For me SAFe is now a red flag that I look for when interviewing. SAFe is now
in the same category as "we don't use source conrol" or "we are like a
family".

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jordiburgos
It should be done every 8-10 weeks to plan for those weeks.

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bradknowles
In my experience, SAFe is an improvement over what has gone before. It
provides a clear path for intake of new work, instead of having stuff dumped
on you that suddenly has to be completed yesterday. It provides a clear method
of identifying inter-team and intra-team dependencies, and then you can apply
methods to address or at least monitor those issues while work proceeds. In PI
planning sessions, I learned so much more about what all is going on in the
other teams and elsewhere around the company, and that helped me do a better
job for my part of the puzzle.

What I’ve seen is that the business types don’t like it. Marketing doesn’t
like it. The bean counters don’t like it. Upper management doesn’t like it. It
doesn’t fit into their neat quarterly buckets. They don’t like that PI
planning takes so much time from so many people, despite the fact that history
has proven over thousands of years that just leaping into things without a
planning process is the surest path to disaster. They don’t like the fact that
the more often PI planning is done, the more effective it is — because the
more time spent between PI planning sessions is more time for things to go off
the rails in ways that could be addressed in a PI planning session.

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elthor89
Personally I am not a fan of SAFe. If you see their process map it’s complete
madness and an agile antithesis.

I think it resonates well with enterprises because every existing management
layer or project manager may stay. They just get a new agile name.

For example, I used work for a large enterprise that was struggling to adopt
agile and get management buy in. However when somebody pitched SAFe it went
fast. Management was onboard, people were trained, and yes more importantly
certified.

Indeed some teams became more productive, and could coordinate better with
other teams. Management had some clue how this new way of working worked.
Criticism I heard was that planning days were long and draining.. Either way
one could say it was a success.

I would say give it a chance, it won’t hurt because people and teams will just
be rebranded. Nothing bad will happen, nor anything super fantastic.

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jordiburgos
SAFe is the way that a $BigEnterprise can say that they are using and being
Agile, which is not the case in my opinion.

SAFe has lots of processes, changes of names from the "real" Agile, planing
like waterfall, ... So not really agile.

