Month: February 2021

SAFe: Evolution Over the Years

It’s very interesting to see how SAFe evolved over the years. The version 2, circa 2013, looked like this:

Some things are worth noting:

  • There is no large solution. Only Team/Program/Portfolio
  • At the program, we find release management.
  • The symmetry between PO/Team/ScrumMaster and PM/Arch/RTE isn’t yet established
  • Spikes and Refactors, a terminology comming from eXtreme Programming
  • Epics are primarily characterized as something that spans releases, to be broken down into features that fit in releases

Interestingly, this setup is very like the structure I know from my work.

This is version 3, circa 2014:

There aren’t that many changes compared to v2. The biggest change seems to be the introduction of value streams at the portfolio level. With it comes the ideas that we fund value streams. We also see some “principles” appear, like the House of Lean, the Lean-Agile Leadership, Built-In Quality at the Team Level.

Here is version 4, circa 2016:

Major changes include:

  • An additional level between program and portfolio: the value stream. The “Solution Train Engineering” from version 5 is a “Value Stream Engineer”. The value stream is very present in this configuration.
  • The symmetry between PO/Team/SM – PM/Arch/RTE – SolMgmt/Arch/VSE is established
  • Release management is subsumed with shared services
  • Community of Practices appears
  • Some additional “principles”: Economic Framework, MBSE, Set-based, Agile Architecture, Core Values, Lean-Agile Mindset, SAFe Principles.

Here’s version 4.5, circa 2018

  • Value Stream Level is replaced with Large Solution Level. With it the Value Stream Engineer becomes a Solution Train Engineer.
  • Supporting artefacts and teams regroupped in a sidebar.

Here is the current version 5.1:

We have several major changes (here’s an detailed analysis of them)

  • The introduction of “Business Agility” as the overarching goal, to be achieved with the profolio level.
  • Introduction of the 7 core competencies (Organizational Agility, etc.)
  • The levels Program and Team merge into “Essential”.
  • Some more “principles”: customer-centricity, design thinking.

By studying the evolution of the framework I understand some things better now.

  • The core of the framework with agile release train and portfolio levels remained quite stable over the years
  • The large-solution level appeared over time, morphing from the value-stream level. The symmetry between the ART and solution level with the 3 roles PM/Arch/RTE took some time to evolve to how it is now.
  • The term epic became more complicated to understand. It started as “something bigger than a release” and existed only at the porfolio level. In SAFe 5, epics can occur at all levels.
  • Supporting artefacts and teams evolved over time, but these were much minor changes. The biggest change was probably the “subsumption” of release management in the shared services.
  • Principles have generously been added continously to the framework. There are now a lot of them.

Just with anything that evolved, some inconsistencies accumulate. I find it interesting to observe this in domains other than code and architecture. For instance, in SAFe 5 the term “program” is still in use (Program Increment, Program Backlog), but the program level disappeared. This is due to historic reasons. Starting directly with the version 5, you would probably name things differently (e.g. “Solution Increment”). Also just like with code and architecture, the framework suffers from feature creep.

Somehow I’m a bit sad that they decided to go away with the “value stream level”. The idea of value stream is very powerful and putting in at center stage was nice. The version 4 has another spin as version 4.5. from an engineering standpoint. With the “value stream level”, various programs deliver independent products that together realize a value stream. With the terminology “large solution” of version 4.5, you get the impression that you have one “large solution” broken down in several components deliverd by various ARTs, that need to be integrated together. The difference can seem subtile, but I prefer the spin of version 4. The “large solution” terminology will tend towards centralization more than the “value stream” terminology.

As for the principles, there are simply too many of them. I believe that the signal-to-noise-ratio here is too high.

Introducing business agility is an interesting move from SAFe. I expect the discussion “development agility “ vs “business agility “ to be all the rage in the coming years. We know how to do agile development. But we still don’t get the expected outcome at the business level. The link is somehow not that trivial as in theory. Version 5 recognizes this and makes it clear that agile development is a mean to an end, not the end itself. It reminds us why we’re making all this. Here’s there’s a clear signal without noise, and it’s valuable.

Stuff Matters

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Stuff Matters is a very nice little book about the materials that surround us. Organized in ten chapter, each tracing the history of a class of material (metal, paper, glass, plastics, chocolate, gels, graphene, concrete, ceramics, biomaterial), we get to better appreciate how much tinkering and research took place over centuries to discover all these materials and their properties.

Most materials in the book are materials we know and can relate to. We know their basic properties, for instance, that rocks are solid, don’t melt easily, and don’t conduct electricity. Having two young children discovering the world, I marveled at how much they still need to discover. For a large part, we learn from personal experience. But we also learn through school, reading, movies, art, architecture. Materials are everywhere and are an integral part of our society and culture. That’s one theme of the book and it resonated well with me.

Mark Miodownik is a good storyteller. When talking about materials, there’s always a human context that makes the story relatable and engaging. For instance porcelain isn’t just porcelain, it’s also the story of Chinese emperors trying to impress their rivals with refinery and sophistication. At the same time, the book has its good share of technical details. We learn about the structure of many materials, including several modern “high tech” materials such as graphene and aerogel. The book even mentions invisibility cloak, how cool is that?

The whole book is interspersed with personal anecdotes. They don’t feel forced and I enjoyed them. Mark Miodownik commands his subject for sure and is passionate about it. I loved the anecdote about him being profoundly impressed by the Crown Jewels of England as a kid. Not because of the luxury they represent but because of their “primitive” materials, mostly pure gold and gems. We can really feel that his passion for the subject came at an early age. And passion is contagious. This book is a nice example of it.

Adventures in Memory

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If you try to think about the last talk that you gave to a large audience, you might recall feeling a bit anxious standing in front of the audience. You might remember people looking at you and how the room looked like. This memory feels complete. Yet, you don’t recall the actual faces of the people in the room, or the details of the room, or the exact setup. This is the magic of memory. Memory is reconstructive.

This particular aspect of memory is one of the many aspects of memory addressed in the book from Hilde and Ylva Østby, “Adventures in Memory: the Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting“. The title is well chosen. The book takes you into a journey about memory, explaining some facets of memory in a tone mixing popular science, journalism, and story telling. Originally written in danish, the cultural references in the book make you travel a bit in scandinavia. It was a refreshing change.

Beside the fact that mermoy is reconstructive, you will learn in the book for instance the difference bewteen semantic and episodic memory; how memory is triggered by places or music; that some people have weird perceptual experiences like synesthesia; techniques to learn random digits; the role of false memories in the judicial system; how remembering and dreaming trigger the same brain activity; what post traumatic disorder really is; and get a confirmation that forgetting things is normal.

I probably actually have already forgotten a lot of details of the book and the list in the paragraph above is far from exhaustive.

As a teenager I always wondered how come that some friends could recall and tell stories way better than me. It turns out I have now the explanation. Our memory isn’t a functional unit that’s identical in every individual. Everybody has a different memory that profoundly shapes who we are and how we experience the world. Mermoy isn’t only about storing facts, it’s also intimately tied to our perception and imagination.

Maybe memory has always fascinated me without me realising it: some of my favourite movies are Be Kind Rewind or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But funilly I had never read anything about how memory works. I’m glad I bumped on this book by serendipity.

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