Pass the Baton SAFe(ly) - Part 2
February 01, 2016

Nicole Bryan
Tasktop

Start with Pass the Baton SAFe(ly) - Part 1

Here are three examples of SLI patterns that you will encounter as you embark on your SAFe implementation journey, as well as ways in which you might use them:

1. Executive Planning to Project Definition

With SAFe, you start out defining investment themes. Then portfolio managers identify the business epics that will meet those investment themes. At that point you hit your first juncture point, because the portfolio manager needs to communicate the business epics to product teams. The roles described here are the "portfolio manager" and the "product manager/business analyst," and the currencies for communication are those business "epics." So you would set up an integration between the portfolio prism and the program prism. At that point SAFely within the program prism (no pun intended), the product manager (usually acting in the role of business analyst at this point) would work with teams to identify the features that meet those business epics. Typical tools involved in this pattern are CA Clarity, Planview, HP PPM, IBM DOORS NextGen, Jama, etc. – essentially PPM tools and requirements management tools.


2. Project Definition to Execution

Now that we have our features, we need to identify our second juncture point. Product managers need to communicate to product owners and scrum masters. And so the features form the currency for communication, and are thus integrated with the team's prism. At this point, teams can take those features and break them down into user stories. I'm glossing over some of the details here but the important thing is to understand that this SLI pattern shares many similarities with the first integration pattern. The batons are being passed and then morphed, but always with that visibility throughout the lifecycle. Typical tools for this pattern are the requirements management tools that you started with in the previous pattern and then agile management tools like JIRA, Rally, IBM RTC and VersionOne.

This brings us to our third SLI pattern, which is a bit different.


3. Resource Allocation

You have your tasks (yes, many agile systems now allow you track time against those tasks), and that time can provide great insights for teams to become more productive at the team level. But you can use that same information that was valuable to the team in its prism to provide extremely valuable timesheet information at the portfolio level. So the roles involved here are "developer" and "portfolio manager." This one is particularly interesting as it is a different style of integration. The two artifacts involved are actually quite different and so the morphing involved is significant. These work logs are actually morphed (in this case aggregated) into timesheets to give value to the portfolio prism.

And so you've come full circle once all three patterns are implemented -- because the typical tools in this pattern are your agile management tools, like JIRA, Rally and VersionOne flowing information back from where you started: CA Clarity, Planview, HP PPM, which track time.


The Baton has now Been Passed

In the end, building large scale software successfully requires organizations to follow an underlying structure and currencies for communication that bring the structure to life. And it is actually the strength of the currencies for communication that make a social event successful. SAFe adeptly provides the necessary structure for scaling software. Even more, it defines the currencies for communication (artifacts) for us. But unique to software development, our currencies actually are morphing currencies through prisms. So equally as important as having the structure and identifying the currencies is the ability to facilitate those currencies being morphed and moved between prisms with ease, something called software lifecycle integration.

And that is why the strength of the currencies for communication for software development, and your success, are dependent on what is described here as a strong software lifecycle integration strategy.

Nicole Bryan is VP of Product Management at Tasktop
Share this

Industry News

March 06, 2025

Parasoft is showcasing its latest product innovations at embedded world Exhibition, booth 4-318, including new GenAI integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to optimize test automation of safety-critical applications while reducing development time, cost, and risk.

March 06, 2025

JFrog announced general availability of its integration with NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.

March 06, 2025

CloudCasa by Catalogic announce an integration with SUSE® Rancher Prime via a new Rancher Prime Extension.

March 05, 2025

MacStadium announced the extended availability of Orka Cluster 3.2, establishing the market’s first enterprise-grade macOS virtualization solution available across multiple deployment options.

March 05, 2025

JFrog is partnering with Hugging Face, host of a repository of public machine learning (ML) models — the Hugging Face Hub — designed to achieve more robust security scans and analysis forevery ML model in their library.

March 05, 2025

Copado launched DevOps Automation Agent on Salesforce's AgentExchange, a global ecosystem marketplace powered by AppExchange for leading partners building new third-party agents and agent actions for Agentforce.

March 05, 2025

Harness completed its merger with Traceable, effective March 4, 2025.

March 04, 2025

JFrog released JFrog ML, an MLOps solution as part of the JFrog Platform designed to enable development teams, data scientists and ML engineers to quickly develop and deploy enterprise-ready AI applications at scale.

March 04, 2025

Progress announced the addition of Web Application Firewall (WAF) functionality to Progress® MOVEit® Cloud managed file transfer (MFT) solution.

March 04, 2025

Couchbase launched Couchbase Edge Server, an offline-first, lightweight database server and sync solution designed to provide low latency data access, consolidation, storage and processing for applications in resource-constrained edge environments.

March 04, 2025

Sonatype announced end-to-end AI Software Composition Analysis (AI SCA) capabilities that enable enterprises to harness the full potential of AI.

March 03, 2025

Aviatrix® announced the launch of the Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall.

March 03, 2025

ScaleOps announced the general availability of their Pod Placement feature, a solution that helps companies manage Kubernetes infrastructure.

March 03, 2025

Cloudsmith raised a $23 million Series B funding round led by TCV, with participation from Insight Partners and existing investors.

February 27, 2025

IBM has completed its acquisition of HashiCorp, whose products automate and secure the infrastructure that underpins hybrid cloud applications and generative AI.