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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

As another poster said here, I've seen Agile work well one time out of many organizations. I think the worst is when individual teams don't choose to use Agile and it instead comes from somewhere high up on the organization: "We are now Agile".

I've not been a part of but I've heard of horrors like SAFe. I've seen the diagrams [0] and I can't believe someone was sold on that.

I guess BigCorp needs to use something as a software delivery methodology. If they don't use Agile what else would they use?

[0] http://torak.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/SAFe-3.jpg

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>I've not been a part of but I've heard of horrors like SAFe. I've seen the diagrams [0] and I can't believe someone was sold on that.

the diagram is an eye candy for a mid-level executive. Upon seeing it, they start dripping saliva and become weak in the knees. The diagram has Lean, Agile and while it is missing the word Scrum it obviously is depicted there too. I've been through couple of years of the process looking extremely similar to that diagram (though word "SAFe" wasn't there) implemented across whole R&D (only super important projects got exception) of a pretty BigCo. Well, it was beyond horror. The product development was basically stalled completely. The gears were churning with lightning speed, people were constantly overworked, rushing to meet multitude of deadlines, .... all that while product just wasn't moving forward. No meaningful features could be delivered. It is hard to believe until you see it with your own eyes.

Then, one nice morning, all the mentioning of it just disappeared, like it never happened, and we're back to happily cranking out according to current release plans with weekly team meetings.

The irony is that "Agile" methods were developed in part to protect developers by poor management. Yet it's the same poor management that relies on off-the-shelf processes.

I've been in so many meeting where a manager tried to espouse the benefits of "being agile": Faster releases, tracking work more accurately, ability for constant review.

But I've never been in a meeting where somebody tries to talk about the benefits to developers: Your goals can't change day to day, your boss doesn't get to strictly tell you what to do or how to do it, and no more arbitrary deadlines!

You really have to listen to how somebody is selling a process to understand their interpretation of it.

What specifically do you think is wrong with SAFe? It's overkill for small teams, but in my experience it works well when you have multiple agile teams working together to deliver frequent releases on a large, complex product.

Looks like the diagrams on the Rational Rose Process.

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