Scrum and SAFe Practitioner for People New to Scrum/SAFe

Explore how cross-functional agile teams within a scaled agile framework deliver customer value, using art with diverse team types, planning interval, and roles like scrum master and product owner.

Learn the two critical art roles: the scrum master team coach and the product owner, covering facilitation, psychological safety, backlog management, and value delivery.

Compare scrum and kanban, detailing time-boxed iterations, pi planning, and end-to-end delivery in scrum, against kanban's focus on optimizing flow and limiting work in progress.

Explore how agile release trains coordinate aligned teams to plan, develop, and deploy value. Identify release train engineer, product manager, system architect, and business owner across scrum and kanban teams.

discover how the planning interval, or pi, coordinates multiple teams in a scaled agile framework to deliver an integrated increment of value through synchronized iterations and release on demand.

Plan the PI within an 8 to 12 week window, forming a high-level integrated increment across ART. Align objectives and deliver value across iterations and the IP through PI planning.

Explore filling the art planning board for pie planning, translating the product vision into 8–12 weeks of objectives and iterations, with a virtual board, dependencies, and milestones.

Prepare PI planning with early invites and a lean backlog of high-level features. Then manage dependencies, limit WIP, set a clear PI objective, and schedule regular inspect and adapt sessions.

Clarify how teams in a SAFe agile release train execute a PI, plan iterations, synchronize across teams, and establish coach and Po syncs to deliver an integrated increment.

Run an integrated system demo during iteration reviews to gather real customer feedback, address risks and impediments, and align stakeholders across the art before the next planning.

Learn how the planning interval (PI) coordinates agile release trains, delivering an integrated value across four development iterations and an IP iteration, with on-demand releases and cross-team collaboration.

Explore how epics, features, and stories form a SAFe hierarchy that delivers value to customers. See how lean portfolio management guides epic delivery across value streams and agile release trains.

SAFe organizes work into epics, features, and stories, delivering features through a single agile release train in a product increment; business features deliver value while enabler features support architecture.

Story points measure relative size, not time, using scales such as Fibonacci and t-shirt sizes, and should be estimated by the team in agile and scaled environments, avoiding management-only estimates.

Define a documented, objective, and testable definition of done to move work from to do to done, and share it across teams in scaled environments for transparency and accountability.

Define acceptance criteria for features, stories, or backlog items in Scrum and SAFe, covering functional, non-functional, and back-end requirements to guide testing and behavior driven development tests with Gherkin.

Refine stories to the level needed to start work, balancing detail with flexibility based on team maturity and scaled standards, guided by invest criteria and acceptance criteria.

Explore anti-patterns in scrum and SAFe, including moving stories, injecting work, treating everything as an emergency, and no work-in-progress limits, with practical countermeasures and guidance.

Avoid rolling work over between sprints; deliberate sprint-by-sprint selection keeps priorities clear. Treat incomplete work as learning opportunities; align with the backlog prioritized by the product owner and maintain morale.

Empower teams to resist injecting work into a sprint by clarifying backlog priorities, trade-offs, and commitments, and by engaging stakeholders in honest two-week sprint conversations.

Compare velocity across teams undermines predictability and morale. Velocity is a team tool for planning story points per sprint, not a universal measure of effectiveness.

Use Jira as a work management tool, not a messaging app; keep tickets updated with clear comments and tags, record decisions in the ticket, and favor face-to-face resolution.

Diagnose the root causes of consistent emergency work to improve sprint predictability, planning, and backlog management, addressing sources from upper management, defects, product management, and customer requests.

Use tags effectively while avoiding proliferation; manage urgency and priority with dedicated fields or swim lanes, and keep the backlog orderly and transparent.

Explore how WIP limits in Kanban manage flow by capping items in progress, revealing bottlenecks, and boosting focus to finish work and deliver value.

agile is not dead; it remains a set of values for better product management, but tools like jira and standups alone don't make you agile.

Explore certification options after this course, including SAFe practitioner, ESP, SAS-1, SPS, Scrum Alliance, and PMI's FMP, and download your completion certificate that counts toward continuing education credits.