AGILE AT SCALE: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OVER SCALED AGILE FRAMEWORK ADOPTION DEMOGRAPHICS AND SUCCESS METRICS
Digital transformation is transforming radically the environment and ecosystem where organizations are situated. Organizations are expected to respond faster, better adapt and constantly evolve. The Agile Manifesto and the subsequent rise of Agile methods indicated that the software development industry was moving forward. Almost after that, Agile methods had become best practices in software development, but applying them to the big picture was revealed to be problematic. Cadence, synchronization, alignment and long term planning are just some challenges organization face when the number of agile team rises, and those and other problems usually reduce the benefits from being agile, including agility itself. More recently, many attempts to solve those problems have resulted in frameworks for scaling agile, Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises (SAFe) being the most commonly adopted. SAFe emerged in 2011 and is actually in its 4.6 version, and has 4 different configuration to match distinct organizational needs. There are few academic studies about how different organizational contexts influences on the selected configuration and the applicability of its practices in the real life. Another important question is whether organizations are measuring and achieving the results comparable to those the framework maintainer’s (successful) case studies. Does it always has a happy ending? In order to better understand those questions, this study will release a questionnaire among SAFe practitioners in order to collect revealing data about implementations, such as context, configuration, practices adopted and metrics adopted and, finally, results in terms of engagement, time-to-market, productivity and defect reduction. Expecting to clarify who benefits more by scaling agile with SAFe.