SAFe 6.0 Fundamentals: Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Basics

Explore how the scaled agile framework integrates lean, agile, and devops at enterprise scale to improve delivery and product quality. Learn alignment, transparency, and relentless improvement through agile release trains.

Learn SAFe overview across portfolio, agile release train (ART), and agile team levels, detailing cross-functional roles, blue and red backlogs, and two-week iterations within planning intervals.

Explore the Scaled Agile Framework big picture and navigate the Scaled Agile Framework website to learn about product management, product owner roles, responsibilities, and customer centricity.

Align teams around a shared vision to keep decisions coordinated from executives to individual teams. Promote transparency by making work visible and learning from mistakes to improve value.

Discover how the SAFe core values respect for people and relentless improvement shape a culture where teams thrive, collaborate, and continuously improve through coaching, data-driven decisions, and iterative problem solving.

Lead with authentic, trust-based leadership and culture, and empower cross-functional teams to deliver value at scale through agile practices, release trains, and built-in quality.

Drive organizational agility by mastering product development flow, large solution integration and delivery, and lean portfolio management, aligning vision, flexible roadmaps, customer-centric design, continuous delivery, and value streams.

Discover the agile mindset, four values, and twelve principles; learn how practices like scrum, self-organizing teams, cadence, timebox, and retrospectives shape frameworks such as design thinking, XP, and SAFe.

Explore the agile manifesto's 12 principles, from early and continuous delivery of valuable software to welcoming changing requirements, delivering working software, collaboration, sustainable pace, simplicity, self-organizing teams, and continuous improvement.

Explore how agile values prioritize individuals and interactions over processes and tools, and working software over comprehensive documentation, to boost collaboration and deliver real value.

Agile values prioritize customer collaboration and responding to change over contract negotiation and plans. This approach helps teams build right product by embracing change and collaborating with customers for satisfaction.

Adopt scalable lean agile principles with economic view, systems thinking, and preserved options to build complex products. Align value streams, cadence, and decentralized decisions to deliver working software continuously.

Compare waterfall and agile methodologies, highlighting six-month waterfall cycles versus one-month agile sprints, MVP delivery, and rapid customer feedback to reduce risk.

Learn how to define a minimum viable product by delivering a usable version for early adopters to provide feedback through an iterative, incremental agile approach.

The agile team in SAFe follows two-week iterations with events like iteration planning, team sync, backlog refinement, and iteration review to plan, refine, and deliver the product increment.

SAFe team level mainly uses scrum to plan, estimate, and deliver prioritized user stories in a two-week iteration, with capacity planning, backlogs, daily team sync, and iteration review.

SAFe product owners connect with customers to understand needs, prioritize features, contribute to the vision and roadmap, manage the team backlog and stories, and support delivery.

Explore markets and user needs, conduct competitor analysis and pricing strategy, engage customers through interviews and focus groups, and define the product strategy to deliver value.

An agile team is a cross-functional, self-organizing unit of 5–11 people, including product owners, scrum masters, team coaches, and developers, choosing Scrum or Safe Kanban to deliver value each iteration.

The Scrum master facilitates planning, supports iteration execution, and removes bottlenecks by coaching agile techniques across Scrum or Kanban to improve flow in value stream and resolve dependencies between teams.

Unite five to twelve agile teams into a single agile release train of 50 to 125 people, align work with a backlog and cadence through cross-functional collaboration to deliver value.

Learn how SAFe captures requirements from epics to user stories, including business and enabler epics, features with benefit hypotheses, acceptance criteria, sizing, and backlog placement.

Discover how SAFe uses weighted shortest job first (WSJF), a lean economics method that prioritizes backlog items by cost of delay divided by job size.

Explore SAFe team level events like iteration planning, daily team sync, backlog refinement, iteration review, and retrospective to plan capacity, inspect the product increment, and improve ways of working.

Identify features and solution vision for upcoming program increments. Participate in PI planning, code sync, PO sync, and ART sync, and review the system demo to support inspect and adapt.

Define the planning interval as an 8 to 12 week time box guiding the agile release train to deliver incremental value through development iterations and an innovation and planning iteration.

Understand Pi planning as a cadence-based heartbeat of the agile release train that aligns teams to a shared mission, with product management guiding feature priorities.

PI planning aligns development to business goals through context, vision, and team objectives, while fostering cross-team collaboration, clarifying dependencies, and matching demand to capacity to speed decisions.

Scrum is a lightweight framework for value through adaptation and learning. It defines roles—Scrum master, product owner, and Scrum team—and artifacts as product backlog and sprint backlog, with inspect-and-adapt cycles.

Explore scrum artifacts—the product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment—and commitments—the product goal, sprint goal, and definition of done—to enhance transparency, focus, and measurable progress guided by product owner, scrum master, and developers.