example of an epic hypothesis statement

The SAFe® Epic – an example

We often have questions about what a “good” sufficiently developed SAFe Epic looks like. In this example we use with clients during the Lean Portfolio Management learning journey, we dive into an example of real-world details behind an epic hypothesis statement.

For now, we have not provided a fully developed SAFe Lean Business Case as an example because business cases are typically highly contextual to the business or mission. That being said please remember that the core of the business case is established and driven from the Epic Hypothesis Statement and carried over into the documented business case.

Agile Lifecycle Management Solution Enabler Epic

Epic Owner: John Q. Smith

Epic Description

The big awesome product company requires a common platform for collaboration on work of all types across the portfolio for all teams, managers, architects, directors, and executives including customer collaboration and feedback loops. This solution will solve the problems in our system where we have poor quality or non-existent measurement and multiple disparate systems to manage and report on work.

For the Portfolio Teams

Who needs to manage their work, flow, and feedback

The single-source system of record for all work

IS A web-based software tool suite that provides customizable workflows that support the enterprise strategic themes related to creating better business and IT outcomes using guidance from the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises (SAFe), Technology Business Management (TBM), and Value Stream Management (VSM) via the Flow Framework

THAT will provide a common place for all customers and portfolio stakeholders to have a transparent vision into all of the work occurring in the system/portfolio, provide a mechanism to manage capacity at scale, and enable easier concurrent road mapping  

UNLIKE the current array of disparate, ad hoc tools and platforms

OUR SOLUTION will organize all work in a holistic, transparent, visible manner using a common enterprise backlog model combined with an additive enterprise agile scaling framework as guidance including DevOps, Lean+Systems Thinking, and Agile

Business Outcomes:

• Validate that the solution provides easy access to data and/or analytics, and charts for the six flow metrics: distribution, time, velocity, load, efficiency, and predictability for product/solution features (our work). (binary)
• The solution also provides flow metrics for Lean-Agile Teams stories and backlog items. (binary)
• 90% of teams are using the solution to manage 100% of their work and effort within the first year post implementation
• All features and their lead, cycle, and process times (for the continuous delivery pipeline) are transparent. Feature lead and cycle times for all value streams using the system are visible. (binary)
• Lean flow measurements — Lead and cycle times, six SAFe flow metrics, and DevOps metrics enabled in the continuous delivery pipeline integrated across the entire solution platform (binary)
• Activity ratios for workflow, processes, and steps are automatically calculated (binary)
• Percent complete and accurate (%C&A) measures for value streams automatically calculated or easily accessible data (binary)
• Number of documented improvements implemented in the system by teams using data/information sourced from the ALM solution > 25 in the first six months post implementation
• Number of documented improvements implemented in the system by teams using data/information sourced from the ALM solution > 100 in the first year post implementation
• Flow time metrics improve from baseline by 10% in the first year post implementation (lead time for features)
• Portfolio, Solution/Capability, and Program Roadmaps can be generated by Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), Solution Management, and Product Management at will from real-time data in the ALM (binary)
• Roadmaps will be available online for general stakeholder consumption (transparency)
• Increase customer NPS for forecasting and communication of solution progress and transparency of execution by 20% in the first year post implementation (survey + baseline)
• Build a taxonomy for all work including a service catalog (binary)
• Run the system and the system produces the data to produce the capacity metrics for all value streams to enable the LPM guardrail (binary)
• Stops obfuscation of work hidden in the noise of the one sized fits all backlog model (everything is a CRQ/Ticket) and allows for more accurate and representative prioritization including the application of an economic decision-making framework using a taxonomy for work (binary)
• Enables full truth in reporting and transparency of actual flow to everyone, real-time – including customers (100% of work is recorded in the system of record)
• Enables live telemetry of progress towards objectives sourced through all backlogs, roadmaps, and flow data and information (dependent)
• 90% of teams are using the solution to manage 100% of their capacity within the first year post implementation

Leading Indicators:

• Total value stream team member utilization > 95% daily vs. weekly vs. per PI
• Low daily utilization < 75% indicates there is a problem with the solution, training, or something else to explore
• % of teams using the ALM solution to manage 100% of their work and effort
• Number of changes in the [old solutions] data from the implementation start date
• Usage metrics for the [old solutions]
• We can see kanban systems and working agreements for workflow state entry and exit criteria in use in the system records
• Teams have a velocity metric that they use solely for the use of planning an iterations available capacity and not for measuring team performance (only useful for planning efficiency performance)
• Teams use velocity and flow metrics to make improvements to their system and flow (# of improvements acted from solution usage)
• Teams are able to measure the flow of items per cycle (sprint/iteration) and per effort/value (story points; additive)
• Program(s)[ARTs] are able to measure the flow of features per cycle (PI) and per effort/value (story points; additive from child elements)
• Portfolio(s) are able to measure the flow of epics per cycle (PI) and per effort/value (story points; additive from child elements)
• % of total work activity and effort in the portfolio visible in the solution
• Show the six flow metrics
• Features (Program) – current PI and two PI’s into the future
• Epics and Capabilities – current PI up to two+ years into the future
• are the things we said we were going to work on and what we actually worked on in relation to objectives and priorities (not just raw outputs of flow) the same?
• The portfolio has a reasonable and rationalized, quality understanding of how much capacity exists across current and future cycles (PI) in alignment with the roadmap
• Identification and reporting of capacity across Portfolio is accurate and predictable;
• Identification of Operational/Maintenance-to-Enhancement work ratio and work activity ratios and % complete and accurate (%C&A) data readily available in the system
• including operations and maintenance (O&M) work and enhancements,
• highlighting categories/types of work
• Work activity ratios are in alignment with process strategy and forecasts, process intent, and incentivizing business outcomes;
• allows leadership to address systemic issues;
• data is not just reported, but means something and is acted upon through decision-making and/or improvements
• # of epics created over time
• # of epics accepted over time
• # of MVP’s tested and successful
• Parameters configured in the tool to highlight and constrain anti-patterns
• Stimulates feedback loop to assist in making decisions on whether to refine/improve/refactor and in that case, what to refine/improve/refactor
• Strategic themes, objectives, key results, and the work in the portfolio – Epics, Capabilities, Features, Stories traceability conveyed from Enterprise to ART/Team level

Non-Functional Requirements

• On-Premise components of the ALM solution shall support 2-Factor Authentication
• SaaS components of the ALM solution shall support 2-Factor Authentication and SAML 2.0
• The system must be 508 compliant
• The system must be scalable to support up to 2000 users simultaneously with no performance degradation or reliability issues
• Must be the single-source system for all work performed in the portfolio and value streams.
• ALM is the single-source system of record for viewing and reporting roadmap status/progress toward objectives

Building your Experiment – The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Once you have constructed a quality hypothesis statement the product management team should begin work on building the lean business case and MVP concept. How are you going to test the hypothesis? How can we test the hypothesis adequately while also economically wrt to time, cost, and quality? What are the key features that will demonstrably support the hypothesis?

• Name First Last

Epical epic. Agile epic examples

What is an agile epic, what to use it for, and foremost how?

Requirements. Small, large, technical, business, operational, and researchable. And above all, plenty of them. During four years of ScrumDesk development, we have more than 800 requirements in our backlog. And these are the only requirements that we have decided to implement without any further ideas that would be nice to have. It is, of course, difficult to navigate such a long list without any additional organization of the backlog structure. And this is where Epic comes to help.

Every Scrum or Agile training introduces the term Epic. In training sessions, epics are presented by only using one image, and essentially, they are not even explained assuming their simplicity. It is not rocket science. However, the question emerges as soon as a product owner starts preparing a backlog of the product. How to organize epics? What are they supposed to describe? How to organize them?

Epic is a set of requirements that together deliver greater business value and touch the same portion of the product, either functional or logical.

Agile Epic, similar to the requirement itself (often User story), is supposed to deal with a problem of single or multiple users and at the same time should be usable and valuable.

How to identify epic?

It is no science at all. Start with thinking about a product from a large perspective. Agile epic is a large high-level functionality. Their size is large, usually in hundreds of story points. However, all these chunks of functionalities must be usable end to end. In practice, we have encountered multiple approaches to epic design. Let’s try to see which one is the best for you.

Epics are managed by product management or other strategic roles. For smaller products, Product Owners identify them. Agile epics help structure your work into valuable parts that can be developed faster while delivering value to users.

I. Epic as a part of the product

Epic can represent a large, high-level yet functional unit of the product. For example, in ScrumDesk we have epics BACKLOG, PLAN, WORK, REPORTS. In the app, you can find parts, and modules, which are called the same way as a given epic.

Top epics of the ScrumDesk product

This backlog organization is appropriate when you are creating a product that you are going to be developing in the long run.

Why use this method of epic organization?

• As a product owner, you simply have to be able to orientate yourself in parts of the product and know what you have or have not finished yet.
• At the same time, it is easy to measure progress by parts of the product.
• The Product Owner is naturally urged to change the order of features in the epic , which leads to the creation of rapid delivery of a minimum of viable product increments .

The disadvantage of this method is the lacking view of the user journey It is not visible which parts of the backlog cover what parts of the user value flow. E.g. process from registration, and basket to payment. Each part of the process can belong to a different epic.

Epics, in this case, do not end here, they are not concluded because the functional unit is delivered in the long term. In years. In the roadmap, the implementation of level features of individual epics is planned.

II. Epic as a part of the business flow

This approach is based on the fact, that we know the flow of values, meaning a business process that we can divide into individual parts and then make it more detailed and deliver iteratively. High-level functionalities follow the business workflows.

Epics by the business workflow

For example, an e-shop. Agile epics candidates would be:

• Product catalog viewing – for portraying categories of goods and a list of goods in each category, filtering and searching for goods.
• Product selection – a selection of interesting products such as favorites, comparing, pricing, or adding to a cart.
• The Cart of the products – browsing the content of a basket, comparing, and counting the total price.
• Payment – choice of payment options, total order, total price, shipping, the payment itself, and payment confirmation.
• Product delivery – a visual display of the delivery status, email, and SMS notifications.

The product owner is naturally able to focus on the delivery of the whole customer’s experience .  The first fully functional version is then created quite quickly and is subsequently improved iteratively. Epic Payment is based on VISA, transfer, and cash. In the first version, only Visa payment will be delivered, transfer and cash in the next one.

The development of epics takes a longer time in this case. It does not usually make sense to close them, as they will be further elaborated in the future by other features. Business easily understands the state of the implemented application (e-shop) which simplifies communication and significantly improves cooperation between IT and business. It is important to use commercial terms rather than technological ones.

III. Project as epic

Do you deliver products to a client in various phases and various projects? In this case, it may be easier to create epics according to projects or the project’s phases.

Epics as project or phase

Such epics are usually considered finished (closed) when the project is delivered. The advantage is obvious. There is an absolutely clear state of implementation of the project. Participants and stakeholders have excellent transparency. At the same time, stakeholders can focus on preparing for the next phase of the project.

On the other hand, it can be quite difficult to keep an overview of the functionalities units of the product itself. The state is more perceived by architects rather than the business itself. In real life, we also came across seeing this way to lead to a change in the company’s focus, or even to the degradation of its vision. A company that once wanted to act as a product and solution maker became a company fully listening to clients. Their products became a ‘toy’ in the hands of clients which led to people leaving teams because they have lost the personal connection with the product. They often lose the power to say NO.

It is also practical to use themes for further categorization of requirements . This creates a virtual matrix, in which each requirement belongs to a certain product set and also might belong to a business theme that is communicated to clients. In ScrumDesk we use, for example, themes for identifying clients who had requested larger sets of features, and we, after all, decided to include them in backlogs. As a product owner, I know how to communicate the status of requirements with a client while still keeping my eyes on the implementation of the product itself.

Epics and Themes

Themes in the product world are often determined by top management at strategic meetings and these topics are subsequently implemented in multiple value streams supported by multiple products. An example of such strategic themes can be 3D Maps, AI (Artificial Intelligence) in risky investments, and traveling without physical gates and cards.

Artificial Epics

In addition to business logic, an application has many parts that create a basic core of a product, but a customer rarely notices them.

First of all, you need to think about and register, for example, the design of architecture, suggestion of UX layout of an app, initial frameworks, and technological preparation. In later phases, the functionalities are still touching the entire product at once. E.g. logging, error handling etc. In ScrumDesk we had an epic called #APPLICATION for such requirements.

When we started four years ago, we decided to keep all bugs in epics titled #TECH. Symbol # indicates artificial epic.

Later we changed this strategy and now we are trying to put every requirement, regardless of its type, under the right epic, as the epic either repairs or expands, improves from the technological point of view.

Epic and business value

In Agile, each requirement should deliver additional business value. However, in the case of more complex applications, it is almost impossible to evaluate the value supplied at such a low level. In this case, it is easier to determine the business value at the level of epic . Epic then can analyze, suggest and prepare ahead of implementation itself beforehand.

It is also possible to create a business case and consequently the business value itself. Such an approach is recommended, for example, Scaled Agile Framework, in which the epic adds value to the selected value stream.

Epics in SAFe

How to prepare epics?

Product Owner prepares epics in advance, prior to planning and implementation.

For good preparation he needs support from multiple people:

• an architect for a rough design of the architecture that is needed to implement the epic,
• stakeholders, for whom the functionality will be delivered, for business value determination and business case,
• UX Designer to work out framework principles of interface design and usability of the epic,
• People from service and support for a good design of epic from the operational perspective,
• And whoever else is needed

PREARE EPICS IN SCRUMDESK FOR FREE

Preparation of an epic can, and often has a different process than the requirements themselves. In SAFe ‘Portfolio Kanban’ is recommended for the preparation of epics. Therefore, a separate Kanban board with multiple statuses exists on which the momentum of the epic realization is transparently displayed. This creates space for regular meetings of a small team preparing requirements ahead and continuous improvement of epic details.

Portfolio Kanban systems for epics management

The Product Owner basically works in two-time spaces. In the first one, he prepares epics for the future, and in the second he contributes to the implementation of already developed epics.

How ScrumDesk helps with epics?

ScrumDesk supports epics from its first version. As we use ScrumDesk for the development of the ScrumDesk, we identified and tried different approaches to backlog organization. In the first version epics were just titles, later we added possibilities to:

• add more details in the description of the epic,
• visualize epics as colored cards in user stories map,
• added an option to track the business value, risk, effort (as an aggregation of child requirements),
• break down epics into features and/or user stories to manage complex backlogs,
• track comments and changes,
• attach files (i.e. business cases),
• possibility to add the timeline for epics and features with the support of agile roadmaps displaying not just plans, but comparing them to reality as well.

Common mistakes

• Epic by technology layer. Database, backend, frontend. Functionality is not covered end-to-end, it only supplies parts of it.
• Epic by product version. The product version is a set of properties from different epics. Unlike the epic, the version has a timeline as well.
• Epic by a customer (stakeholder) to which part of the functionality is being delivered. If you need to evidence the customer, evidence it in a separate attribute and organize the epics according to the procedures above.
• When the product assumptions change, the form of epic organization will not readjust. Adapt and select appropriate approaches as needed. Do not be afraid to work with the backlog and change it so you can orient quickly, you can choose other ways of epics organization and especially to have it transparent for the team as well as stakeholders.
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/sebrendel/8155603332
• http://www.scaledagileframework.com/epic/
• http://www.scaledagileframework.com/portfolio-kanban/

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About the author: dusan kocurek.

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What is an epic in agile? Complete guide with examples

Agile development is an iterative process that enables software development teams to accelerate their time to market by fostering and embracing a culture of continuous learning. Agile teams learn by doing.

In product development, the strategy and roadmap is based on data and insights from the market, which is always evolving. The product team must be dynamic enough to adapt to shifting requirements and user needs. This is a core agile value as outlined in the Agile Manifesto .

It’s not enough to anticipate user needs because they are ever-evolving. Agile development teams work in short, iterative sprints , which affords them the flexibility and pragmatism required to deliver complex products.

What is an epic?

An epic is a feature or functionality consisting of multiple building blocks and scenarios. Epics are derived from themes or initiatives and can be segmented into smaller pieces called user stories .

An epic can span across multiple sprints, teams, and even projects. The theme, epic, and user stories share the same strategic goal at different levels of the focus area.

Consider the example of building a house. If an initiative is like building the ground floor, an epic is like creating a kitchen and a user story is like building a wall, with each brick being a task.

Agile development breaks down a broad product vision into small, achievable tasks that produce frequently updated results.

Like building a house, the product development lifecycle can feel overwhelming. The direction of where to start may not be apparent to everyone working on the product. But it helps to break down the larger initiative into several themes — for example, building the foundation and the ground floor.

You can break it down further into epics — e.g., building each room — and then even further to building a wall. This gives us a clearer picture of what we need to achieve today to make meaningful progress toward the strategic initiative .

In large organizations, where several cross-functional teams are involved in product development, epics help everyone get on the same page around development goals, dependencies, and priorities.

Epics vs. user stories vs. initiatives

Depending on the organization’s size, the product’s complexity, the composition of initiatives, themes, and epic may vary in dimensions. Smaller products or organizations may only have one top hierarchy. However, if the design of scale is used within the circumference of an organization, the basic idea is the same.

A product roadmap boils down to smaller, achievable tasks. In any product development cycle, multiple features concurrently fulfill users’ needs. But that doesn’t mean the product needs to be fully developed with all features complete at the time of launch .

A core value of agile development is quick delivery and learning by doing. Breaking the theme into various levels helps shorten the product development lifecycle from ideation to execution.

This segmentation also helps in prioritization by slicing the initiative into more manageable minimum viable products (MVPs) . The MVPs can be developed and launched to the user within a short period, allowing the team to learn and iterate, validate ideas, and adjust the roadmap as necessary.

Regardless of how you structure the hierarchy structure of themes/initiatives, epics, and user stories, each level is defined with a purpose.

Themes and initiatives

Themes and initiatives define the product vision. The big idea is segmented into strategic goals.

The purpose of the theme is to be the North Star, providing a clear picture of the entire organization’s focus area.

The initiative can be closing a market gap, addressing a pain point, innovation, market fit, etc.

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An epic is the actualization of the product roadmap. The initiative is further segmented into defined features to develop.

Epics create alignment between the organization and the product development when it comes to prioritization .

User stories

A user story is user-focused and driven by user value.

Even though the product vision and roadmap come from within the organization, development should always be completely user-centric. User stories help the development team empathize with the user and clarify the value produced as a result of the product from the customer’s perspective.

How to write an epic

An epic is a high-level requirement of a feature. When writing an epic, your goal is to align stakeholders with your product vision and roadmap. To achieve that alignment with clarity and focus, you should provide all the relevant information, including any dependencies, clarify any misunderstandings, and establish a clear direction with a measurable goal.

Collaboration is key to a good epic description. Though the product manager is responsible for writing an epic spec, they’re not expected to be an expert at all levels. When creating an epic spec document, collaborate with your team to discuss and align on solution design, UX design, and the customer journey. Bring in all the required knowledge and expertise early to avoid getting stuck later on.

What to include in an epic

Every development is different, so the epic specs will differ from product to product. Some epics include granular detail while others only highlight high-level requirements.

An epic should include at least the bare minimum information the product team requires to get started on user stories and prioritize tasks to solve the customer’s needs as efficiently as possible.

Introduction

The introduction should outline the “why” and the “what” — the reason for prioritizing and developing the feature and user pain points to solve. You should also include the metrics and KPIs for measuring the performance.

In addition, any documentation or early wireframes you can provide go a long way toward establishing a common understanding of the goal and path to successful delivery. Some things to consider:

• Summary of features and reasons for developing them
• Performance metrics and KPIs
• Links to specific documentation
• Marketing plans and legal requirements (if any)
• Early wireframes

Product requirements

An essential objective of the epic is to establish a shared understanding of the development goal. The epic should include the feature’s functional and nonfunctional requirements.

The product requirements documentation might mention availability in multiple languages or on multiple devices, for example.

Design requirements

You should always collaborate with the UX designer to write the design requirement. They are the expert and will surely have insights to share from their countless user test experiences.

Examples of product design requirements might include things like:

• Where to place search functionality for each device
• A request for a prototype to simplify future group discussions

Engineering requirements

You should strive for alignment with the target architecture while compiling the high-level requirement in an epic. Like the tech stack or solution design, consideration in the early stages will help you estimate more accurately and maximize efficiency down the line.

For example, let’s say the engineering team wants to create an API to integrate with some existing database functionality to fetch a list of songs. Investigating these opportunities during the initial stages of creating the epic helps you avoid incurring inadvertent technical debt .

KPI and metrics

KPIs guide every product development cycle. A concrete set of metrics and goals will help the teams focused and motivated to hit stated objectives.

KPIs should be tangible and measurable. A vague KPI is of no value and does not motivate action. At first, some KPIs may seem not measurable, but after aligning with data analysts, there is always a way to measure development value in numbers.

For example, increasing customer satisfaction is a good KPI, but a little vague. Instead, try adding metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) or the number of times a user interacts with a new functionality in one session.

A real-world example of an epic

Let’s consider the example of a music streaming app to demonstrate how an epic is structured. Suppose you want to add search functionality to the app. The database contains more than 1 million songs from across the globe — a key differentiator for your product, so the search functionality is deemed critical to enable users to find whatever music they are looking for intuitively.

Using the epic template below, our epic would look something like this:

Keeping with this example, an epic spec document pertaining to the items populating the template above might read as follows:

The new search functionality will allow users to narrow down their search and offer suggestions to help them find the music they want to listen to instantly.

Our research shows that 86 percent of our user base is interested in the search functionality. Since the most commonly identified problem with searching music is that people can’t remember or recognize the song’s name, a voice search service shows the most considerable demand.

We expect this functionality will increase the number of songs played per user by 10 percent on average, which will result in approximately 30 percent additional time spent per month using the app.

• Users can initiate a search from multiple suitable pages in the app
• Users can begin a voice search
• AI integration in search functionality
• Customized search suggestions
• Should include tracking on each page
• Display search suggestions in a list filtered is different categories
• Design should work with accessibility rules
• New API’s to be built only in the new backend system
• Dependencies shared with the AI integration team
• Conversion rate: Clicks on the suggested list of songs
• Use of voice search: Avg. use per session per user

A good epic spec document will help you foster collaboration and achieve alignment across your team and your organization. Epics also make it easier to write user stories, slice down and prioritize the backlog, and run a smoother scrum .

In agile development, all the frameworks, structures, and processes are created with one principle: the ability to be flexible and deliver quickly to learn iteratively.

The main goal of any process or documentation is to create alignment, avoid misunderstanding, and minimize inadvertent technical debts while accelerating time to market.

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What Is An Agile Epic? Best Practices, Template & Example

Agile epics are a crucial tool for grouping user stories into bigger initiatives and structure an agile backlog. Here are some pro tips on how you can use epics to their full potential.

Do you know the difference between an agile epic and a user story ? Or how to best use agile epics for your product requirements and product roadmap? If you’d like to learn how to use agile epics to your advantage, read on for my top seven tips and a template to start.

What Is An Agile Epic?

An agile epic is a useful tool in agile project management used to structure your agile backlog and roadmap.

Simply put, an agile epic is a collection of smaller user stories that describe a large work item. Consider an epic a large user story. For example, epics are often used to describe a new product feature or bigger piece of functionality to be developed.

An epic is the top informational level in an agile backlog. It contains several user stories and each user story in turn contains all the tasks required for implementation.

Agile epics are mostly used when a piece of work is too big to be delivered in a single sprint or iteration. If you use an epic to group your user stories for a new feature, it is easy to keep track of progress and know what percentage of work is completed versus outstanding. 

Epics are usually written and maintained by the product owner or product manager. 

7 Best Practices To Using Agile Epics

There is no set template for an agile epic. You can write it in any way you like as long as it helps with planning your work and communication with your agile teams and stakeholders. 

Regardless if you use a scrum or kanban or a hybrid development process, epics will help you plan your work and report on it.

Here are some tips to make sure that your agile epics are most useful. 

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1. Start With Epic Then Stories (Top Down)

Finding your epics can very usefully be done with a user story map . Your top level “Activity” in the user story map becomes an epic and the lower levels become the user stories, tasks, and acceptance criteria . 

When you are developing a whole new product, starting with epics and fleshing them out in more detail as you go along, gives you an idea of the milestones completed and outstanding. 

Often agile epics correspond to features or larger improvements (e.g. a redesign of part of your product), but it is entirely up to you how you want to structure your epics. 

2. Name An Epic Well

When you name your agile epics, think about who will consume this information. For example, your agile development teams need to understand what they are building and your stakeholders also need to understand your progress. 

Whereas a user story describes an end-user need, it’s good practice if the epic describes an outcome you want to achieve with it.

Consider these examples for epic names:

• Checkout flow V2
• Streamline checkout flow
• Increase conversion rate in checkout

The first name doesn’t describe at all what it is other than some kind of work on checkout. The second name is better as it describes that the checkout flow is to be streamlined. But the third name is even better as it includes an outcome that you want to achieve with this streamlining. 

In agile management tools, like Atlassian’s Jira for example, epics can be used for filtering, grouping, and reporting. Therefore choosing a name that speaks for itself is important.

3. Make Your Epics The Right Size

An epic is usually used when work on a backlog item requires more than a single sprint to complete. An epic can break down into as many user stories as you like as long as you can keep track of the whole list. 

An epic should be not too big and not too small. A rule of thumb would be an implementation timeframe between a few weeks and a few months. This is a good size for reporting on the percentage completed. 

Making epics too big means that progress is very slow, percentages hardly increase over a two-week sprint and reporting is not meaningful. Also if an epic takes too long to implement, there are likely to be so many changes to requirements along the way that reporting progress almost becomes meaningless. 

Making epics too small means that you will have a great number of them to juggle in your backlog or roadmap. It can become difficult to retain a high-level view of many smaller tasks. Also if epics are completed in a very short time (e.g. a single sprint), they just add additional overhead without providing much value. 

4. Use Epics To Structure Your Backlog

Epics are an excellent way to structure a product backlog that usually consists of a very long list of user stories. Not every story requires to be included in an epic, as small pieces of work are simply completed within one sprint. But to structure bigger items of work into epics has two main benefits:

• It provides a high-level view of the big items in your backlog,
• As the size of an epic is made up of the addition of story points of all its user stories, epics also provide a comparison of the relative size of initiatives for prioritization . 

The list of epics can also be used to create a high-level view of a product roadmap for senior management.

5. Use Epics To Coordinate Multiple Teams

Epics can be very useful to coordinate chunks of work across multiple agile software development teams. Combining work for multiple product teams in a single epic allows you to break down the reporting per team and track progress overall. 

6. Include Success Metrics

When defining an epic it is worthwhile thinking about what success metric can be associated with it. Ultimately all product deliverables serve to bring value to end-users. Including a success metric in your epic means that development team members and stakeholders all understand what you are trying to achieve with this piece of work. 

Some companies use OKRs to set quarterly goals. Referencing an OKR metric in an epic is an excellent way to tie an epic back to the business objectives. 

7. Make Epics Flexible In Scope

As an epic describes a high-level work item continuing over several weeks or months, it is likely that new insight arises or new technical complications are discovered as work progresses. Therefore an epic needs to be flexible in scope. 

The scope of an epic is defined by the scope of its associated user stories, usually measured in story points.  As new requirements emerge, new user stories may be added and the scope of the epic increases.

Related Read: Best Agile Product Management Software

Agile Epic Template 

There is no set format for an epic, but a few things are useful as described above.

• Choose a good name that speaks for itself.
• In the description,  give a rough outline of what the epic encompasses. Reference any company goals to illustrate how this ties in with business priorities.
• The success metric describes specifically what will be measured after completion of this epic.
• Big user story denotes a user story at the level of the whole epic. This is very useful in order to document how this epic delivers a better user experience.  

More Articles

Product strategy: what it is, and how to nail it, the top 10 ux design trends of 2024, 13 brainstorming techniques every product manager needs to know, agile epic example.

Here is an example of an epic for a new streamlined mobile app checkout flow in order to increase conversion. 

Within this epic, we could then have user stories such as:

• Integrate Apple Pay ( “As a buyer, I want to pay with one touch on my phone so that I can complete checkout quickly” )
• Use billing address as shipping address per default ( “As a buyer, I want to enter my address details only once so that I can complete checkout quickly” )

Agile epics are a flexible tool in your agile toolkit. When starting a major new development, think about the big pieces of work required to complete it and define a few epics. You can then create all your user stories within these epics as you go along and retain a much better overview than in an unstructured backlog. 

Epics can be used in many ways. I would be very interested to learn how you use epics in your agile teams in the comments. 

For more articles with hands-on practical information about a great variety of product management topics—including agile methodology!— subscribe to our newsletter .

Also Worth Checking Out:

• Product Pricing: Value-Based Strategy, Software Packaging with Dan Balcauski
• 4 Best Online Agile Product Management Certifications

Developing a Winning Epic Hypothesis Statement that Captivates Stakeholders using SAFe

The Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe, was created in 2011 and built upon the classic Agile manifesto by incorporating key ideas from the Lean methodology.

Organisations using this framework can accomplish a wide range of advantages, according to SAFe developers, such as:

20-50% increases in productivity

30-75% quicker time to market

10-50%Increases in employee engagement

Assume that in order to reap the benefits of project management, your Executive Action Team (EAT) wants to embrace a Lean-Agile mentality. If so, it needs to become proficient in crafting and presenting an Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS). Check out the Agile certification course to learn more.

Creating a strong EHS and persuading your stakeholders to embrace your bold idea are crucial to attaining business agility and optimising development procedures. On the other hand, neglecting to do so will impede your pipeline for continuous delivery and hinder you from effectively creating functional software.

It’s imperative that you nail your EHS pitch because there is a lot riding on it. We’ve developed this useful tool to assist you pitch your Epic Hypothesis Statement to your EAT in order to support these efforts.

Table of Contents

What Is an Executive Action Team (EAT)?

One of the cross-functional teams in the SAFe framework is the Executive Action Team (EAT). This group drives organisational transformation and eliminates barriers to systemic advancement. Additionally, the EAT will hear your EHS and choose whether or not to add it to the Epic queue.

The idea that change must originate at the top is one of the fundamental tenets of the lean-agile approach. An effective EHS pitch will pique the interest of Executive Action Team stakeholders and persuade them to adopt your Epic Hypothesis Statement.

What Is an Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS)?

A comprehensive hypothesis that outlines an epic or sizable undertaking intended to overcome a growth impediment or seize a growth opportunity is called the Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS).

Epics are typically customer-facing and always have a large scale. They need to assist a business in meeting its present requirements and equip it to face obstacles down the road.

The Epic Hypothesis Statement (EHS) is typically delivered to the EAT in the style of an elevator pitch: it is brief, simple, and concise, although the statement itself will be highly thorough.

Key Components of an Epic Hypothesis Statement

The Portfolio Kanban system’s initial funnelling phase is expanded upon in the Epic Hypothesis Statement. The concept started out as just one, like “adding self-service tools to the customer’s loan management portal.”

You must refine this fundamental concept into a fully realised endeavour in your role as the Epic Owner. In the event that your theory is verified, you must also describe the anticipated advantages the firm will enjoy. Your EHS also has to have leading indications that you can track as you move toward validating your hypotheses.

Let’s expand on the example of the self-service tool.

You could expand on the basic premise of integrating self-service capabilities into the loan management portal that is visible to customers if you wanted to develop an EHS. Indicate which specific tools you want to use and how they will enhance the client journey in your explanation of the initiative.

For example, the following could be considered expected benefit outcomes of this initiative:

• A reduction in calls to customer service
• Better customer satisfaction and engagement
• improved image of the brand

It’s true that some advantages would be hard to measure. Complementary objectives and key results (OKRs) are therefore quite important to include in your EHS since they will support your pitch to your EAT regarding the benefits of your EHS.

Pitching Your EHS

It’s time to submit your finished Epic Hypothesis Statement to the EAT for consideration. You need to do the following if you want to involve your stakeholders.

Make Use of Powerful Visuals

The Agile manifesto and the Portfolio Kanban system both stress the value of visualisation. Including images in your EHS pitch demonstrates to your audience that you understand these approaches in their entirety and aids with their understanding of your concept.

Explain the Applicability of Your OKRs

Your suggested endeavour and the OKRs you’ve chosen should be clearly connected. Nevertheless, it never hurts to emphasise this point by outlining how each OKR you select will assist in monitoring the advancement of your theory’s proof.

Close the Deal with a Powerful Concluding Statement

Your Epic Hypothesis Statement is ultimately a sales pitch. Handle it as such by providing a succinct yet captivating conclusion. Go over the possible advantages of your project again, and explain why you think it will help the business achieve its short- and long-term objectives.

The Perfect EHS Pitch Starts with a Great Idea

By utilising the aforementioned strategies and recommendations, you can create an extensive EHS that grabs the interest of your stakeholders. But never forget that the quality of your idea will determine how well your pitch goes.

Work with your EAT to integrate ideas that have a significant impact into your workflow for managing your portfolio. Next, choose a notion you are enthusiastic about and develop your hypothesis around it. You’ll have no trouble crafting the ideal EHS pitch.

Conclusion  To learn more about Agile and SAFe, check out the SAFe Agile certification course online.

What is Interruption Testing?

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Implementing SAFe: Requirements Model (v6)

Table of Contents

What is the SAFe Requirements Model?

The SAFe Requirements Model is a hierarchical structure that manages and organizes requirements in large-scale Agile projects.

The SAFe Requirements Model helps organizations align their business objectives with their development efforts, ensuring that teams deliver value incrementally while focusing on the overall strategy. The SAFe Requirements Model is organized into three levels:

• Epics are high-level initiatives representing significant organizational value and span multiple planning intervals.
• Features are mid-level requirements that provide more detailed descriptions of the functionality needed to achieve the goals set forth by the Epics.
• Stories are the smallest units of work, representing individual tasks to be completed by Agile teams, typically within a single iteration.

What are SAFe Epics?

Portfolio Epics are large-scale business initiatives that drive change and provide substantial business benefits.

The strategic investment themes drive all new development, and requirements epics are derived from these decisions.

Epics are large-scale development initiatives that realize the value of investment themes.

Epics in the SAFe Requirements Model are large-scale, cross-cutting initiatives that encapsulate significant development efforts and provide substantial value to the organization or end-users. They can be business epics, which focus on delivering customer or user value, or enabler epics, which address technical or architectural enhancements to support the development of business epics. Epics typically span multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and Planning Intervals (PIs), requiring collaboration and coordination among various teams.

Epics are the highest-level requirements artifact used to coordinate development. In the requirements model, they sit between investment themes and features.

• Epics are usually driven (parented by) investment themes. However, some epics can be independent (they do not require a parent to exist).
• Epics are not implemented directly. Instead, they are broken down into Features and User Stories, which the teams use for actual coding and testing.
• Epics are not directly testable. They are tested through the acceptance tests associated with the features and stories that implement them.

What are the key elements of a SAFe Epic Statement?

An Epic Statement comprises a brief description, the customer or business benefit, and the success criteria.

When documenting epics in SAFe, the following key elements are included:

What are the differences between SAFe Business Epics and Enabler Epics?

Business Epics delivers direct business value, while Enabler Epics provides the technological or architectural advancements necessary to support business Epics.

In the SAFe Requirements Model, the difference between enabler epics and business epics lies in their focus and purpose:

• Business Epics: These are large-scale initiatives aimed at delivering customer or user value, addressing new features, products, or services that have a direct impact on the organization’s business outcomes. Business epics typically focus on solving customer problems, capturing market opportunities, or improving the user experience.
• Enabler Epics: These epics focus on technical, architectural, or process enhancements that support the development and delivery of business epics. Enabler epics may not provide direct customer value but are essential for improving the organization’s underlying infrastructure, technology, or capabilities, making it easier to deliver business value more efficiently and effectively.

Business Epics and Enabler Epics in SAFe serve different but equally important roles. Business Epics are initiatives that deliver direct customer or business value. They represent substantial investments and have a clear tie to business outcomes. On the other hand, Enabler Epics support the implementation of Business Epics. They represent the necessary technological or architectural advancements that facilitate the delivery of business value. While they may not directly impact the customer, they are vital in realizing Business Epics.

What is the SAFe Portfolio Backlog?

The Portfolio Backlog is a prioritized list of Portfolio Epics.

The Portfolio Backlog within SAFe serves as the repository for upcoming Portfolio Epics. It is a prioritized list of Epics, with those at the top representing the highest priority and most significant initiatives that need to be undertaken. This backlog helps to align the organization around the most important strategic initiatives, allowing for effective decision-making and allocation of resources across the portfolio.

The Portfolio Backlog provides a clear picture of the organization’s direction and value delivery at the Portfolio level, guiding the allocation of resources, funding, and coordination of efforts across multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and Solution Trains to align with the overall strategy.

What are SAFe Product Features?

SAFe Product Features are serviceable system components that provide business value and address user needs.

Features are described as follows:

Features are services provided by the system that fulfill stakeholder needs.

Within the realm of SAFe, Product Features are distinct pieces of functionality that are of value to the user or the business. They are typically larger than individual User Stories and represent services the system provides that fulfill specific user needs. Features form a critical part of the Program Backlog.

In describing the features of a product or system, we take a more abstract and higher-level view of the system of interest. In so doing, we have the security of returning to a more traditional description of system behavior, the feature.

Features as ART-Level Artifacts

A “Feature” in the SAFe Requirements Model is a high-level, functional requirement that delivers value to the end-user or customer. Features are typically part of a larger product or system and are aligned with the goals of a specific Planning Interval (PI), which usually spans 8-12 weeks.

Features live above software requirements and bridge the gap from the problem domain (understanding the needs of the users and stakeholders in the target market) to the solution domain (specific requirements intended to address the user needs).

Features are usually expressed as bullet points or, at most, a couple of sentences. For instance, you might describe a few features of an online email service like this:

Enable “Stars” for marking important conversations or messages, acting as a visual reminder to follow up on a message or conversation later. Introduce “Labels” as a “folder-like” metaphor for organizing conversations.

Feature Statement and Template

In the SAFe Requirements Model, a feature is typically documented using the following:

What are the differences between SAFe Features and SAFe Capabilities?

SAFe Features are system functionality that provides value to users, while SAFe Capabilities are higher-level functionalities that provide value to customers and stakeholders.

SAFe distinguishes between Features and Capabilities based on their level of abstraction and scope. Features at the Program Level are functionality increments that address user needs and deliver value. They are smaller in scope and more detailed compared to Capabilities. On the other hand, Capabilities are placed at the Large Solution Level, representing higher-level functionalities that deliver value to customers and stakeholders. They are typically bigger, encompass broader functionality, and may require multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to implement.

The main difference between capabilities and features in the SAFe Requirements Model lies in their scope and granularity:

• Capabilities : Capabilities are high-level functional requirements that describe essential building blocks of a solution in the Large Solution level of the SAFe Requirements Model. They span multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and represent the functionality needed to deliver value to end-users or customers. Capabilities provide a broader perspective on the solution and help coordinate efforts among multiple ARTs working together.
• Features : Features are smaller, more granular functional requirements at the Program level in the SAFe Requirements Model. They describe specific functionalities or enhancements that deliver value within a single Agile Release Train (ART). Features are derived from capabilities and are broken down into user stories, which Agile teams implement during iterations.

In summary, capabilities are high-level, cross-ART functional requirements for large-scale solutions. At the same time, features are more granular, ART-specific requirements that deliver value as part of a product or system.

How are SAFe Features tested?

SAFe Features are tested through iteration testing, integration testing, and system demos.

The SAFe approach to testing Features involves three specific practices, ensuring functionality and integration, and they are:

• Iteration Testing , where each feature is tested during the iteration it’s developed.
• Integration Testing is where Features are tested in conjunction with other system elements to ensure they work together properly.
• System Demos allow stakeholders to inspect the integrated system and provide feedback, enabling further refinement and validation of Features.

Story-level testing ensures that methods and classes are reliable (unit testing) and stories serve their intended purpose (functional testing). A feature may involve multiple teams and numerous stories. Therefore, testing feature functionality is as crucial as testing story implementation.

Moreover, many system-level “what if” considerations (think alternative use-case scenarios) must be tested to guarantee overall system reliability. Some of these can only be tested at the full system level. So indeed, features, like stories, require acceptance tests as well.

Every feature demands one or more acceptance tests, and a feature cannot be considered complete until it passes.

What are Nonfunctional Requirements?

Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) are specifications about system qualities such as performance, reliability, and usability.

In SAFe, Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) denote the ‘ilities’ – system attributes like scalability, reliability, usability, and security. Unlike functional requirements, which define what a system does, NFRs describe how it does it. These are critical factors that shape system behavior and often have system-wide implications. NFRs are a constant consideration throughout the development process, helping to ensure that the system meets the necessary standards and delivers a satisfying user experience.

Nonfunctional Requirements as Backlog Constraints

From a requirements modeling perspective, we could include the NFRs in the program backlog, but their behavior tends to differ. New features usually enter the backlog, get implemented and tested, and then are removed (though ongoing functional tests ensure the features continue to work well in the future). NFRs restrict new development, reducing the level of design freedom that teams might otherwise possess. Here’s an example:

For partner compatibility, implement SAML-based single sign-on (NFR) for all products in the suite.

In other cases, when new features are implemented, existing NFRs must be reconsidered, and previously sufficient system tests may need expansion. Here’s an example:

The new touch UI (new feature) must still adhere to our accessibility standards (NFR).

Thus, in the requirements model, we represented NFRs as backlog limitations.

We first observe that nonfunctional requirements may constrain some backlog items while others do not. We also notice that some nonfunctional requirements may not apply to any backlog items, meaning they stand alone and pertain to the entire system.

Regardless of how we view them, nonfunctional requirements must be documented and shared with the relevant teams. Some NFRs apply to the whole system, and others are specific to a team’s feature or component domain.

How are Nonfunctional Requirements tested?

Nonfunctional Requirements are tested through methods like performance testing, usability testing, and security testing.

The testing of Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) in SAFe involves specialized techniques corresponding to each type of NFR. For instance, performance testing measures system responsiveness and stability under varying workloads. Usability testing assesses the system’s user-friendliness and intuitiveness. Security testing evaluates the system’s resistance to threats and attacks. By testing NFRs, teams ensure that the system delivers the right functionality and provides the right quality of service, thereby maximizing user satisfaction and trust.

Most nonfunctional (0…*) requirements necessitate one or more tests. Instead of labeling these tests as another form of acceptance tests and further overusing that term, we’ve called them system qualities tests. This name implies that these tests must be conducted periodically to verify that the system still exhibits the qualities expressed by the nonfunctional requirements.

What is the SAFe ART Backlog?

The SAFe Program Backlog is a prioritized list of features awaiting development within an Agile Release Train.

Within SAFe, the Program Backlog serves as a holding area for upcoming Features, which are system-level services that offer user benefits and are set to be developed by a specific Agile Release Train (ART). These Features are prioritized based on their value, risk, dependencies, and size. The backlog helps provide transparency and drives PI planning, guiding the ART toward achieving the desired outcomes.

Features are brought to life by stories. During release planning, features are broken down into stories, which the teams utilize to implement the feature’s functionality.

What are SAFe User Stories?

SAFe User Stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the capability, usually a user or customer.

User Stories within SAFe are a tool for expressing requirements. They focus on the user’s perspective, facilitating a clear understanding of who the user is, what they need, and why they need it. User Stories promote collaboration and customer-centric development by emphasizing value delivery and verbal communication.

What is the definition of a SAFe User Story?

A SAFe User Story is a requirement expressed from the end-user perspective, detailing what the user wants to achieve and why.

In SAFe, a User Story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. It is centered around the end-user and their needs, providing context for the development team. User stories are the agile alternative to traditional software requirements statements (or use cases in RUP and UML), serving as the backbone of agile development. Initially developed within the framework of XP, they are now a staple of agile development in general and are covered in most Scrum courses.

In the SAFe Requirements Model, user stories replace traditional software requirements, conveying customer needs from analysis to implementation.

A user story is defined as:

A user story is a concise statement of intent that outlines what the system needs to do for the user.

Typically, user stories follow a standard (user voice) format:

As a <role>, I can <activity> so that <business value>.

This format encompasses elements of the problem space (the delivered business value), the user’s role (or persona), and the solution space (the activity the user performs with the system). For example:

“As a Salesperson (<role>), I want to paginate my leads when I send mass e-mails (<what I do with the system>) so that I can quickly select a large number of leads (<business value I receive>).”

What are the 3-Cs of user stories?

The 3-Cs of user stories refer to Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.

In the realm of SAFe, these three Cs are fundamental to the creation and execution of User Stories. The “Card” typically represents the User Story, written in simple language. “Conversation” signifies the collaborative discussions that clarify the details of the User Story and refine its requirements. “Confirmation” establishes acceptance criteria to determine when the User Story is completed successfully. This trio of components ensures clarity and shared understanding in value delivery.

• “Card” refers to the two or three sentences that convey the story’s intent.
• “Conversation” involves elaborating on the card’s intent through discussions with the customer or product owner. In other words, the card also signifies a “commitment to a conversation” about the intent.
• “Confirmation” is the process by which the team, via the customer or customer proxy, determines that the code fulfills the story’s entire intent.

Note that stories in XP and Agile are often manually written on physical index cards. However, agile project management tools usually capture the “card” element as text and attachments in the enterprise context. Still, teams frequently use physical cards for planning, estimating, prioritizing, and visibility during daily stand-ups.

This straightforward alliteration and Agile’s passion for “all code is tested code” demonstrates how quality is achieved during code development rather than afterward.

The SAFe Requirements model represents the confirmation function as an acceptance test verifying that the story has been implemented correctly. We’ll refer to it as story acceptance tests to distinguish it from other acceptance tests and consider them an artifact separate from the (user) story.

The model is explicit in its insistence on the relationship between the story and the story acceptance test as follows:

• In the one-to-many (1..*) relationship, every story has one (or more) acceptance tests.
• It’s done when it passes. A story cannot be considered complete until it has passed the acceptance test(s).

Acceptance tests are functional tests that confirm the system implements the story as intended. Story acceptance tests are automated whenever possible to prevent the creation of many manual tests that would quickly hinder the team’s velocity.

What is the difference between SAFe Enabler Stories and SAFe User Stories?

SAFe Enabler Stories support the exploration, architecture, infrastructure, and compliance activities needed to build a system, unlike User Stories, which focus on end-user functionality.

The main difference between an enabler user story and a typical user story in the SAFe Requirements Model lies in their focus and purpose:

• Enabler Story: An enabler story represents work needed to support the development of a product or system but does not necessarily deliver customer value directly. Enabler user stories are used to address technical or architectural needs, reduce technical debt, or improve infrastructure. They are often larger and more complex than typical user stories, as they address non-functional requirements crucial for the product’s success.
• User Story: A typical user story represents a specific feature or functionality that delivers value to the customer or end-user. Typical user stories are more focused and granular than enabler user stories, describing specific actions or behaviors the user can perform with the product. They are usually smaller and more straightforward than enabler user stories, making them easier to estimate and prioritize.

Enabler Stories in SAFe facilitate the technical aspects of the system under development, such as architectural advancements or exploration activities. They differ from User Stories, which are primarily concerned with user-facing functionalities. Although Enabler Stories do not directly deliver user-valued functionality, they are vital for the evolution of the system and the delivery of future user value.

What are User Story sub-tasks?

User Story sub-tasks are smaller, manageable tasks derived from a User Story to facilitate its implementation.

Sub-tasks provide a way to break down a User Story into smaller, actionable pieces of work. These smaller tasks make the implementation more manageable and provide a clear path to completion. Sub-tasks can be assigned to different team members and tracked separately, providing a granular view of progress toward completing the User Story.

To ensure that teams fully comprehend the work required and can meet their commitments, many agile teams adopt a detailed approach to estimating and coordinating individual work activities necessary to complete a story. This is done through tasks, which we’ll represent as an additional model element:

Tasks implement stories. Tasks are the smallest units in the model and represent activities specific team members must perform to achieve the story. In our context:

A task is a small unit of work essential for completing a story.

Tasks have an owner (the person responsible for the task) and are estimated in hours (typically four to eight). The burndown (completion) of task hours indicates one form of iteration status. As suggested by the one-to-many relationship shown in the model, even a small story often requires more than one task, and it’s common to see a mini life cycle coded into a story’s tasks. Here’s an example:

• Task 1: Define acceptance test—Josh, Don, Ben
• Task 2: Code story—Josh
• Task 3: Code acceptance test—Ben
• Task 4: Get it to pass—Josh and Ben
• Task 5: Document in user help—Carly

In most cases, tasks are “children” of their associated story (deleting the story parent deletes the task). However, for flexibility, the model also supports stand-alone tasks and tasks that support other team objectives. This way, a team need not create a story to parent an item like “install more memory in the file server.”

What are User Story Acceptance tests?

User Story Acceptance tests are predefined criteria that a User Story must meet to be considered complete.

Acceptance tests for User Stories in SAFe provide clear, specific criteria determining when the story is done. These criteria are defined by the Product Owner in collaboration with the team and quality specialists and are based on the user’s expectations. They ensure the delivered functionality meets the desired value and quality, driving user satisfaction.

What are User Story Unit Tests?

User Story Unit Tests are low-level tests designed to verify the functionality of individual components of a User Story.

Unit tests in the context of User Stories involve testing individual components or units of the software to ensure they perform as expected. Developers typically create these tests during the implementation of the User Story. They form the first line of defense in catching and correcting defects, ensuring the integrity of the codebase, and promoting high-quality delivery.

Unit tests verify that the smallest module of an application (a class or method in object-oriented programming; a function or procedure in procedural programming) functions as intended. Developers create unit tests to check that the code executes the logic of the specific module. In test-driven development (TDD), the test is crafted before the code. Before a story is complete, the test must be written, passed, and incorporated into an automated testing framework.

Mature agile teams employ extensive practices for unit testing and automated functional (story acceptance) testing. Moreover, for those in the process of implementing tools for their agile project, adopting this meta-model can provide inherent traceability of story-to-test without burdening the team. Real Quality in Real Time

The fusion of crafting a streamlined story description, engaging in a conversation about the story, expanding the story into functional tests, augmenting the story’s acceptance with unit tests, and automating testing are how Scaled Agile teams achieve top-notch quality during each iteration. In this manner: Quality is built in, one story at a time. Ongoing quality assurance is accomplished through continuous and automated execution of the aggregated functional and unit tests.

How are Stories used in User Research or Data Science contexts?

Stories in User Research or Data Science represent hypotheses or questions about user behavior that need to be answered using data.

In User Research or Data Science, stories often take the form of hypotheses or research questions about user behavior. These stories guide the research process, providing clear objectives and helping to structure the analysis. By focusing on the user and their needs, these stories promote a user-centric approach to data analysis, helping to uncover meaningful, actionable insights.

Research (User Research, Data Science Research, etc.) has become integral to software development in today’s data-driven landscape. Like traditional software development, research activities also benefit from breaking work into smaller, manageable tasks. Although not officially part of the SAFe Requirements Model, we have devised a variation on the user story to address this unique aspect of data science projects. This document integrates with the team level in SAFe, ensuring that data science work aligns with Agile principles and practices.

What is a hypothesis test?

A hypothesis test is a statistical method used to make decisions or draw conclusions about population parameters based on sample data.

Within the statistical domain, hypothesis testing serves as a cornerstone methodology. It’s a process that allows analysts to test assumptions (hypotheses) about a population parameter. It involves formulating a null and alternative hypothesis, choosing a significance level, calculating the test statistic, and interpreting the results. This technique enables uncertainty-free decision-making, allowing organizations to draw data-driven conclusions and make informed decisions.

What is a hypothesis test in an Agile context?

A hypothesis test in an Agile context is a method used to validate assumptions about user behavior, system performance, or other product aspects based on collected data.

Hypothesis testing in Agile, particularly in fields like AI, research, data science, or user research, is a powerful tool for evidence-based decision-making. It involves creating a hypothesis about a particular user behavior, system characteristic, or other aspect of the product. This hypothesis is tested using real-world data collected from users, system logs, experiments, or other sources. The hypothesis test results confirm or reject the initial assumptions, providing insights into product development and improvement. It aligns with the Agile principle of learning through iteration, allowing teams to make data-informed decisions and continuously improve the product based on user feedback and empirical evidence.

What are Analytical Stories, and how are they used for data-driven insights?

Analytical Stories are questions or hypotheses guiding data analysis to obtain valuable business insights.

Analytical stories focus on data-driven insights, predictions, or recommendations that help solve business problems or enhance decision-making. They describe the desired outcome or question to be answered using data analysis, machine learning, or AI techniques. Analytical stories typically involve data exploration, feature engineering, model development, and validation. They include a clear objective, relevant data sources, and success criteria to measure the effectiveness of the analysis.

A typical Analytical Story includes the following seven elements:

What are Infrastructure Tasks?

Infrastructure Tasks are activities related to setting up or maintaining the technical environment that supports software development.

Infrastructure Tasks within SAFe encompass the essential activities that enable and support the development and delivery of software. These tasks range from setting up development environments and configuring servers to maintaining databases and managing network resources. While these tasks may not directly contribute to end-user features, they create a stable, efficient environment for delivering value. They are thus an integral part of the SAFe framework.

What is the Team Backlog?

Scaled Agile teams must maintain the utmost efficiency to ensure overall organizational effectiveness. To achieve this, we must adopt the simplest and leanest possible requirements model that caters to the needs of all stakeholders, especially team members. This model must be quintessentially agile, consistent with most agile training and common practice, and devoid of unnecessary administrative overhead, manual traceability, reporting, or detailed requirements.

Initially introduced by Scrum as a product backlog , the term “backlog” has evolved in our enterprise model to accommodate various levels of work. As a result, we use the term backlog in a more generalized sense. In the Big Picture, we refer to the backlog we’re discussing here as the Scaled Agile team’s local backlog.

This local backlog is the Scaled Agile team’s single, definitive source of work, containing all tasks (primarily user stories) that must be completed. Managed and maintained by the team, it serves as their repository for all identified work items, with its contents typically of little concern to others within the enterprise. The team has full autonomy over managing, tooling, and organizing their backlog to meet their iteration objectives.

The product owner, a Scaled Agile team member, is responsible for maintaining and prioritizing the backlog.

The Scaled Agile team’s backlog consists of all the team’s identified work items. In the meta-model, we generically refer to these work items as stories (or backlog items). For our purposes, we define a story as follows:

A story is a work item contained in the team’s backlog.

This simple definition encapsulates the agile approach’s focus on value delivery. The user story is a special kind that defines the system’s behavior and value for the user. We need to expand the model slightly to make the user story explicit.

With this minor addition, the backlog now consists of user stories and other work items. Other work items include refactors, defects, support and maintenance, tooling, and infrastructure work. These other work items help the team track all tasks needed to deliver value and enable better estimation of the time required to deliver user stories. We will discuss the rationale for specifically identifying these other work items later.

What is the SAFe Product Roadmap?

The SAFe Product Roadmap visually summarizes a product’s direction, highlighting upcoming features and milestones.

The Product Roadmap in SAFe outlines the anticipated journey of a product over time. It visually communicates the direction and progress of the product by displaying upcoming Features and Significant Milestones. This roadmap aids in setting expectations for stakeholders and helps align teams toward common objectives. It is a strategic tool that shows a high-level view of the product’s evolution while providing a common understanding of its future direction.

What is the composition and purpose of the Product Roadmap?

The Product Roadmap comprises planned features, milestones, and timelines to align stakeholders on a product’s future direction.

The Product Roadmap in SAFe combines planned Features, significant Milestones, and Timelines.

• Features derived from the Program Backlog represent the upcoming functionality increments.
• Milestones denote important events or achievements.
• Timelines provide a temporal context for the Features and Milestones.

The central purpose of the roadmap is to provide a shared understanding of the product’s future direction among all stakeholders. It aids expectation management, facilitates strategic decision-making, and promotes team alignment.

The Roadmap comprises a series of planned release dates, each with a theme and a prioritized set of features. Although it is mechanically simple to represent the Roadmap, determining its content is different.

The outcomes of release planning are utilized to update the (product or solution) Roadmap, which offers an understanding of how the enterprise aims to deliver increasing value over time.

How do you balance flexibility and expectation management with Product Roadmaps?

Balancing flexibility and expectation management with Product Roadmaps involves frequent revisiting, stakeholder communication, and applying a rolling wave planning approach.

Achieving the right balance between flexibility and expectation management when dealing with Product Roadmaps involves three specific activities, and they are:

• The roadmap is a living document that is revisited and updated frequently to adapt to changing circumstances.
• Regular communication with stakeholders to set and manage expectations effectively.
• Applying a rolling wave planning approach allows the teams to plan in detail for the near term while keeping a flexible outlook for the distant future. This method enables the roadmap to remain a useful strategic tool, providing direction without constraining agility.

In the SAFe Requirements Model, the Roadmap comprises a series of planned release dates, each with a theme, a set of objectives, and a prioritized feature set. The “next” release on the Roadmap is committed to the enterprise based on the work completed in the most recent release planning session. Releases beyond the next one are not committed, and their scope is somewhat vague.

Thus, the Roadmap embodies the enterprise’s current “plan of intent” for upcoming and future releases. However, it is subject to change—as development facts, business priorities, and customer needs change—therefore, release plans beyond the next release must not be used to establish external commitments.

What is the SAFe Product Vision?

SAFe Product Vision is a clear, inspiring goal representing the future state of a product.

In the SAFe Requirements Model, the Product Vision is a high-level, strategic description of the desired end state for a product or solution. The Product Vision guides Agile teams, helping them make decisions, prioritize features, and align their work with the organization’s broader objectives. Fostering a shared understanding and commitment across teams and stakeholders is essential, ensuring consistent direction throughout the product development process.

What are the key elements of the SAFe Product Vision?

The key aspects of the SAFe Product Vision include target state, customers, needs, and differentiation.

The Product Vision addresses six specific questions, and they are:

• What is this program’s strategic intent?
• What problem will the application, product, or system resolve?
• What features and benefits will it offer?
• Who will it cater to?
• What performance, reliability, etc., will it deliver?
• What platforms, standards, applications, etc., will it support?

The Product Vision in SAFe defines the ‘target state’ – a snapshot of the product’s desired future. It identifies customers or the audience who will benefit from the product. It outlines ‘needs’ – the problems or challenges the product will address. Lastly, it spells out ‘differentiation’ – how the product stands out from its competitors. Together, these components shape a comprehensive and compelling vision that informs and motivates everyone involved in the product’s development.

How is the SAFe Product vision documented?

The SAFe Product vision is documented using a vision statement, vision board, datasheet, draft press release, or vision box.

Since the product and software requirements specification documents and the like are unlikely to exist, directly communicating the Vision for the Scaled Agile program must take a different form. Agile teams take a variety of approaches to communicating the Vision. These include the following: 

• Vision document 
• Vision Board
• Draft press release 
• Preliminary data sheet 
• Backlog and Vision briefing

Documenting the Product Vision in SAFe can be approached in several ways. One common method is a ‘vision statement’ – a concise, written articulation of the product’s future state. Alternatively, a ‘vision board’ is created using images and text to represent the product’s goals visually. Another approach is a ‘vision box,’ a mock-up of the product’s packaging containing key information about the product. These methods help communicate the vision clearly and compellingly, enabling all stakeholders to align their efforts toward achieving it.

Product Vision Statement and Template

The Product Vision document in SAFe typically includes the following elements:

How do you balance the Product Vision and Timelines in SAFe?

Balancing the Product Vision and Timelines in SAFe requires continuous alignment of stakeholders, prioritizing based on value, and maintaining a sustainable pace.

Achieving equilibrium between the Product Vision and Timelines in SAFe involves three strategies, and they are:

• Regular alignment of stakeholders ensures everyone understands the product’s direction and the timelines involved.
• Prioritizing Features based on their value and dependencies ensures the most impactful work is done first.
• Maintaining a sustainable pace of development prevents burnout and ensures the team consistently delivers value over time, thereby upholding the Product Vision while adhering to the set Timelines.

What is the Architectural Runway in SAFe?

Architectural Runway in SAFe is the technical foundation that supports upcoming feature delivery without substantial redesign.

In SAFe, the Architectural Runway refers to the pre-existing, evolving technical infrastructure that enables the smooth delivery of impending features, minimizing the need for extensive, time-consuming redesigns. It’s a critical part of Agile development, ensuring readiness for future iterations, and is maintained and extended by implementing Enabler Epics and stories.

What is the Purpose of Architectural Runway?

The purpose of Architectural Runway is to ensure readiness for the implementation of upcoming features with minimal redesign.

The architectural runway is defined as follows:

A system with architectural runway contains existing or planned infrastructure sufficient to allow the incorporation of current and anticipated requirements without excessive refactoring.

The primary role of the Architectural Runway in SAFe is to provide a robust, flexible technical framework that aids in the swift and efficient delivery of impending features. Organizations can avoid the delays and resources associated with substantial system redesigns by having a well-maintained Architectural Runway, thereby promoting a smooth, continuous flow of value to the end users.

What are the Architectural Requirements in SAFe?

Architectural Requirements in SAFe are the technical prerequisites necessary for feature implementation.

Architectural requirements in SAFe denote the technical conditions that must be met to facilitate the successful deployment of new features. They define the system’s architecture, design, and infrastructure guidelines. This information directs teams when constructing or modifying the system, ensuring alignment with the system’s overall design and the company’s strategic objectives.

Architectural Runway and the Enterprise Portfolio

Addressing crucial technology initiatives.

In the context of an enterprise’s portfolio of products and in the face of a series of shorter, incremental releases, architectural runway answers a crucial question:

What technology initiatives need to be underway now so that we can reliably deliver a new class of features in the next year or so?

Distinguishing from Side R&D Projects

Here, we’re not discussing side R&D projects that an enterprise may use to determine technology strategies, establish feasibility, etc. Those are localized efforts and are managed by teams or system architects. Instead, we’re discussing large-scale changes to the code base necessary to support features on the current roadmap and changes that could affect most, or even all, development teams.

Examples of Large-Scale Architectural Changes

Here are some examples:

• Implement a standard install, licensing, and user authentication model across each product in the suite.
• Convert the transaction server to a microservices-based architecture.
• Redesign the operating system to support symmetrical multiprocessing.

The Importance of Timely Implementation

These changes are not simple refactors. They will involve significant, structural changes that could affect millions of lines of code and require dozens (or even hundreds) of person-years. And, if the enterprise wants to accomplish it next year or even the year after, it must start now.

To start now, this work needs to be defined and communicated to the team like any other major initiative, even though the end-user value may be a year or so down the road.

Collaborative Maintenance of the Architectural Runway

The System Architect/Engineer continuously maintains and evolves the architectural runway in collaboration with Agile teams, allowing for faster delivery of value to customers and reducing technical debt. It is critical to enable the product’s scalability, performance, and maintainability throughout its lifecycle.

How are SAFe Architectural Epics Implemented?

SAFe Architectural Epics are implemented through prioritization, analysis, implementation, and acceptance steps within the Portfolio Kanban system.

Architectural Epics in SAFe are significant initiatives that guide the evolution of the system’s technical aspects. Their implementation follows a structured approach within the Portfolio Kanban system.

• The Architectural Epic and its benefits are documented.
• Architectural Epics are prioritization based on the cost of delay or WSJF.
• Detailed analysis, including Lightweight Business Case development, follows.
• The implementation stage begins upon approval, spanning multiple Planning Intervals (PIs) if needed.
• The acceptance step concludes the process, validating that Epic’s intended benefits have been realized.

Architectural epics will be implemented incrementally in the main code line, just like any other epic. By doing so, development teams commit to a “do no harm” refactoring approach. In other words, they implement these large-scale refactors in small increments. At each PSI, they commit to “do no harm” to the systems or its users. They roll out the architectural changes piecemeal and reveal the new capabilities to the users only when there’s sufficient infrastructure to do so. It isn’t easy. It is agile. And it does work.

How is the SAFe Architectural Runway sustained?

You sustain the SAFe Architectural Runway by continuously implementing Enabler Epics and Enabler Stories.

Sustaining the Architectural Runway in SAFe involves a continual focus on implementing Enabler Epics and Enabler Stories. These elements enhance and extend the existing technical infrastructure, ensuring it stays aligned with current and future business needs. Regularly addressing the technical debt and investing in the system’s modularity, scalability, and security are other crucial aspects of maintaining a healthy Architectural Runway. This proactive approach ensures the system remains flexible and capable of supporting the swift, efficient delivery of new features.

What are the risks of neglecting the Architectural Runway?

The continuous build-out and maintenance of new architectural runways are the responsibility of all mature agile teams. Failing to do so will result in one of two negative outcomes:

• Release dates will be missed because large-scale, just-in-time infrastructure refactoring adds unacceptable risk to scheduling.
• Failure to systematically extend the architecture means teams eventually run out of runway. New features cannot be added without significant refactoring. Velocity slows. The system eventually becomes so brittle and unstable that it has to be entirely rewritten.

How is the Architecture Maintained at the Portfolio, Program, and Team Levels?

This work must happen continuously at each Portfolio, Program, and Team level.

Portfolio Level

The Scaled Agile Portfolio-level architectural runway is achieved by defining, communicating, and implementing architecture epics that drive the company’s technology vision. Some will require significant levels of investment and consume substantial resources. In the short term, some may even reduce the velocity of current and new feature implementations. Because failing to implement them will eventually compromise the company’s position in the market, architectural epics must be visible, estimated, and planned just like any other epic.

Program Level

At the Program level, product managers, system teams, project teams, and architects translate the architectural epics into architectural features relevant to each release. They are prioritized, estimated, and resourced like any other feature. And, like features, each architectural initiative must also be conceptually complete at each release boundary to not compromise the new release.

At the Team level, refactors and design spikes are often necessary to extend the runway and are prioritized along with user stories. This way, architectural work is visible, accountable, and demonstrable at every iteration boundary. This is achieved by agreement and collaboration with system architects, product owners, and agile tech leads, who determine what spikes need to happen and when.

What are Investment Themes?

Investment themes are categories of investments aligned to SAFe’s business strategy.

In SAFe, Investment Themes are broad categories that reflect the business’s strategic objectives and are used to guide resource allocation. They serve as a way to group Portfolio Epics that align with a particular business goal or strategy. This helps the organization ensure its investments align with strategic priorities and facilitates the decision-making process for funding and resource allocation.

Themes have a longer lifespan than epics and may remain mostly unchanged for a year or more.

Investment themes (or product themes) embody the initiatives that guide an enterprise’s investment in systems, products, applications, and services. They represent crucial product or service value propositions that offer market differentiation and competitive advantage. Collecting strategic investment themes for an enterprise or a business unit within an enterprise establishes the relative investment objectives for that entity. Managers are empowered to develop the initiative in the most economically and business-sensible manner for the enterprise within the partition (budget allocation). However, they typically can only exceed the budget or borrow resources from other themes with the agreement of the relevant stakeholders. Through this process, the enterprise exercises its fiduciary responsibility by directing investment towards agreed-upon business priorities.

What is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a set of organization and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale.

SAFe is a comprehensive guideline for large-scale, complex software systems. SAFe delivers Agile practices to individual teams and across teams of teams or Agile Release Trains (ARTs). By aligning the organization around value delivery and establishing a Lean-Agile mindset, SAFe aims to increase productivity, improve product quality, and foster faster time-to-market.

Why is Scaled Agile Requirements Management Important?

Scaled Agile Requirements Management facilitates alignment, visibility, and value delivery at scale in an Agile enterprise.

Requirements management in a SAFe context is central to aligning all Agile teams to deliver customer value. It ensures the requirements are visible, understandable, and actionable across all enterprise levels – from Portfolio to Program to Team. This alignment and transparency lead to improved productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction

What are the key benefits of implementing the SAFe Requirements Model?

Implementing the SAFe Requirements Model boosts an enterprise’s alignment, transparency, agility, and customer-value delivery.

Implementing the SAFe Requirements Model presents nine specific benefits for multi-team environments, and they are:

• Enhanced Alignment : The SAFe Requirements Model aligns teams, programs, and portfolios to strategic objectives, ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals.
• Improved Transparency : By making requirements traceable and visible at all levels, the model fosters transparency and improves decision-making.
• Increased Agility : The iterative nature of the SAFe Requirements Model allows organizations to adapt quickly to changes, making them more responsive to market shifts and customer needs.
• Customer-Centric Focus : The model’s emphasis on delivering customer value ensures products and services meet customer needs, improving customer satisfaction.
• Risk Reduction : Regular feedback and iterative development reduce the risk of major failures, as issues are be identified and addressed earlier in the process.
• Higher Quality Outputs : With continuous feedback and iterative refinement, the quality of the final product or service is likely to be higher.
• Efficient Resource Utilization : With clear, traceable, and actionable requirements, teams work more efficiently, reducing wasted time and resources.
• Improved Collaboration : The model fosters a culture of collaboration and shared understanding, promoting better communication within and across teams.
• Business Success : With a focus on delivering value to customers, the SAFe Requirements Model ultimately contributes to business success by creating products and services that customers want and need.

The SAFe Requirements Model ensures that requirements are clearly understood, traceable, and actionable across all organizational levels. It promotes alignment between business strategy and technology execution, boosting efficiency and effectiveness. Fostering iterative development and continuous feedback enhances the enterprise’s agility, enabling faster response to changing customer needs. It emphasizes delivering customer value, thus improving customer satisfaction and business success.

What is the connection between SAFe and the SAFe Requirements Model?

The SAFe Framework uses the SAFe Requirements Model to structure, manage, and track requirements at all levels.

In the context of SAFe, the Requirements Model serves as a tool for organizing and understanding the diverse requirements that emerge in an enterprise context. It aids in the translation of business goals into actionable development tasks, facilitating a smoother workflow from concept to cash. It’s built to accommodate Epics, Capabilities, Features, and Stories that represent different levels of granularity in the requirements.

What is the role of the SAFe Requirements Model in modern organizations?

The SAFe Requirements Model acts as a bridge between business strategy and technology execution in modern organizations.

The SAFe Requirements Model helps translate business strategy into technological execution. Structuring requirements at different levels – Epics, Capabilities, Features, and Stories – enables better communication, clearer understanding, and more efficient implementation of strategic initiatives across the organization.

What are the disadvantages of traditional requirement management?

Traditional requirements management methods often lead to delayed feedback, limited adaptability, and misalignment between business and technology teams.

Traditional methods are often linear and rigid, expecting requirements to be fully defined upfront and rarely adapting to changes. This approach results in delayed feedback loops and a lack of agility to respond to changing business needs. Moreover, these methods often struggle to align business strategy with technology execution, leading to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and solutions that don’t meet the intended business value.

How do SAFe and Traditional Requirements Models differ?

The SAFe Requirements Model is iterative, adaptable, and focuses on delivering customer value, contrasting with traditional models, which are linear, rigid, and often business-centric.

Unlike traditional linear and fixed models, the SAFe Requirements Model allows for iterative refinement and adaptation. It promotes continuous feedback and adjustments as a project progresses, ensuring the final product meets customer needs. Moreover, it focuses on delivering customer value rather than meeting rigid business requirements. This customer-centric approach, coupled with flexibility and adaptability, differentiates the SAFe Requirements Model from traditional ones.

How does the SAFe Requirements Model extend the Agile Requirements methods?

The SAFe Requirements Model expands traditional Agile methods to accommodate large-scale, complex enterprises.

Traditional Agile methods are excellent at the team level but struggle when scaling to larger organizations. The SAFe Requirements Model addresses this by introducing a hierarchical structure for requirements that aligns with the layered structure of large enterprises. It integrates Epics, Capabilities, Features, and Stories, ensuring that business objectives are effectively translated into actionable development tasks at all organizational levels.

What are the SAFe Core Competencies?

SAFe’s seven core competencies, including Agile Product Delivery, provide a holistic approach to delivering value in a Lean, Agile, and sustainable manner.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) defines seven core competencies, and they are:

• Lean-Agile Leadership:  Inspires adoption of Agile practices.
• Team and Technical Agility:  Enhances team capabilities and technical skills.
• Agile Product Delivery:  Delivers customer value through fast, integrated delivery cycles.
• Enterprise Solution Delivery:  Manages large-scale, complex solutions.
• Lean Portfolio Management:  Aligns strategy and execution.
• Organizational Agility:  Enables quick, decentralized decision-making.
• Continuous Learning Culture:  Encourages innovation and improvement.

What are the SAFe Principles?

The SAFe Principles are a set of ten fundamental principles derived from Lean and Agile methodologies that guide the implementation of SAFe.

SAFe principles are guidelines derived from Agile practices and methods, Lean product development, and systems thinking to facilitate large-scale, complex software development projects. The ten principles that make up the SAFe framework are as follows:

• Take an economic view:  This principle emphasizes the importance of making decisions within an economic context, considering trade-offs between risk, cost of delay, and various operational and development costs.
• Apply systems thinking:  This principle encourages organizations to understand the interconnected nature of systems and components and prioritize optimizing the system as a whole rather than individual parts.
• Assume variability; preserve options:  This principle highlights the importance of maintaining flexibility in design and requirements throughout the development cycle, allowing for adjustments based on empirical data to achieve optimal economic outcomes.
• Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles:  This principle advocates for incremental development in short iterations, which allows for rapid customer feedback and risk mitigation.
• Base milestones on an objective evaluation of working systems:  This principle emphasizes the need for objective, regular evaluation of the solution throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring that investments yield an adequate return.
• Make value flow without interruptions:  This principle focuses on making value delivery as smooth and uninterrupted as possible by understanding and managing the properties of a flow-based system.
• Apply cadence, and synchronize with cross-domain planning:  This principle states that applying a predictable rhythm to development and coordinating across various domains can help manage uncertainty in the development process.
• Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers:  This principle advises against individual incentive compensation, which can foster internal competition, and instead encourages an environment of autonomy, purpose, and mutual influence.
• Decentralize decision-making:  This principle emphasizes the benefits of decentralized decision-making for speeding up product development flow and enabling faster feedback. However, it also recognizes that some decisions require centralized, strategic decision-making.
• Organize around value:  This principle advocates that organizations structure themselves around delivering value quickly in response to customer needs rather than adhering to outdated functional hierarchies.

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How to Write an Epic (for Product Managers)

What is an epic.

An epic in product management is a group of related development tasks between high-level strategic themes and actionable user stories.

You can think of an epic in two ways:

1.) The top-down view:

An epic is a body of work that a product team devises as they break down a strategic theme into smaller initiatives. A theme on your product roadmap might contain two or more epics.

2.) The bottom-up view:

An epic is a body of work representing a group of user stories sharing a common strategic goal. Several related stories on the roadmap will often roll up to a single epic.

What is an Example of an Epic in Product Management?

Look at the graphic at the top of this page. It represents a section of a hypothetical software company’s product roadmap. Let’s review the details to see how the epics fit into the team’s strategy, which flows from one central theme.

THEME: Increase the number of people using our free trial

To achieve this goal, the product team has identified two epics. We’ll examine just the first one and the user stories that flow from it.

EPIC: Simplify the trial download process

As you can see, this epic represents a subset of the theme to bring in more trial users. But the work required here, to simplify the trial download process, is more than a development team can complete in a single sprint.

For this reason, the team must further break down this epic into user stories that the developers can complete in one sprint.

USER STORY #1: Shorten the signup form

The product team believes trial usage has been low because the current signup form contains too many questions. It turns off visitors.

Following this user story, the team will cut out all but the necessary lead-collection questions. The form might ask only for the user’s full name and email address.

USER STORY #2: Move the signup form from our site into the app itself.

The product team has identified another challenge in their trial process. When users click the “TRY IT FREE” button, they encounter the signup form right away. They have not yet invested time in starting the download process, so they are more likely to abandon the form.

The team would like to let users make progress accessing the trial version before filling out the form. They can download the app, install it on their computer, and see the product interface on their screen. Then, before they can perform any action with the product, they’ll need to complete the form.

This way, users have already invested time and effort in starting the trial. They can also see that they can start using the app immediately after they’ve finished the form.

Bottom line: A product team develops an epic by breaking down a high-level product theme into more manageable components. Then, they will need to break down each epic into actionable tasks, the user stories.

How to Write an Epic?

There are many ways you can write an epic. But most approaches have a few steps every day. Let’s walk through them.

Step 1: Name the epic.

Before you can start planning the details of the epic, you need to give it a clear, concise title.

On the hypothetical roadmap above, the product team identified two strategic actions to help achieve their theme of increasing trial downloads. For one of those strategies, they named the epic “Simplify download process.”

You want to start your epic writing process with the name because it helps clarify your strategic goals. You will also find it helpful to have a standard way of describing the strategy. It will reduce confusion and miscommunication among your team .

Step 2: Write a narrative explaining the epic.

Next, you will write a short description of what you hope to achieve with the epic. This narrative should contain at least the following:

1. Who: the persona (in this case, the product manager )

2. What: your objective

3. Why: the value behind the objective

Here is a template you can use to fill in the details:

As the [product manager] , I want to [simplify the trial download experience] so that [we increase the number of people who complete the trial download process] .

Pro tip: You can also include another sentence or two with background information that helps explain why this epic matters.

For example, in our hypothetical, you might include a note about your research, which includes:

• Current abandon rates on your trial download web page
• Data indicating these abandon rates are higher than the industry average
• Data showing that your signup form contains more fields than the industry average

Step 3: Establish the scope for the epic.

You will now want to jot down the scope of work for this epic—in other words, the boundaries. The range of work will help your team to stay on track.

Going back to our hypothetical, “Simplify the download process,” you might want to specify:

• Which trial downloads to focus on
• Which form fields to eliminate (and which to keep)
• Where you wish to relocate the form

Step 4: Define completion for the epic.

As a product manager, your team will need to know when to define completion for the epic. You will also need to write a clear set of acceptance criteria—the high-level list of requirements your team will need to approve. With our hypothetical, this acceptance criteria would include:

• The development team can confirm that we can track the abandon rate in the app, where we’ve moved the form.

Step 5: Break the epic down into stories.

At this point, you’ve technically completed and understand how to write an epic in product management. The epic writing phase is complete. You are now ready for the next stage: writing the user stories. But we include this as step 5 to show you how epic creation should flow naturally into writing actionable tasks that your developers can add to their next sprint.

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Using Tracker to Communicate Epic Hypothesis Statements

At Pivotal, our teams use an agile project management tool called Pivotal Tracker. This software enables real-time collaboration around a single, shared, prioritized backlog. A product manager uses Tracker to write fine-grained user stories using a syntax that supports our opinionated development process. Most feature stories contain a scenario and acceptance criteria, using the Gherkin syntax to define and communicate user value. Here’s what that template looks like:

As a persona

I want to do a thing/be prevented from doing a thing

So that user value

Given preconditions

When actions

Then results

This works well for conversations within the product team, and between the team and the product owner, who are all focused full time on the product and its progress. For a startup, this could describe all the necessary—and all the interested—parties.

Product teams that are part of larger organizations often find their stakeholders must spread their attention across multiple product teams. For casual users of Tracker, the level of detail intrinsic in small feature stories in Gherkin can be disorienting. With all these details in the way, it can be difficult to keep the big picture in view.

Fortunately, Tracker includes the concept of epics , larger scale stories or themes that can be used to group smaller feature stories into more abstract descriptions of user and business value. By directing casual users to a list of epics, we have found that they can stay informed about the product team’s progress without getting mired in the details of the Features backlog. And they are more likely to remain engaged in the agile XP process.

The epic story type includes a description field, just like the one in the feature story type. How can this be asset leveraged to communicate higher level business value for the product stakeholders?

From experience with feature stories, we know a standard syntax reduces cognitive overhead, so we’ll look for a variation of the feature Gherkin. Since the stakeholders tend to be business focused, a formal business hypothesis format is a strong contender. The goal is to craft a premise with defined goals that can be proven or disproven (measured) as the epic is built and deployed.

The first part is the value statement :

For customers

Who do a thing

The solution

Is a something (the “how”)

That provides this value

Next come the business outcomes , which state the benefits to the business if the hypothesis is proven correct. This is followed by leading indicators , the early metrics that will tell us if we’re on the right track. Finally, the nonfunctional requirements outline the systems that will have to be built or altered to support the epic.

Unlike competitor, current solution, or nonexistent solution

Our solution does something better (the “why”)

Here’s an example using a pseudo-real-world business hypothesis:

For third-party contractors

Who make changes to our data

The Snowball Epic

Is a streamlined workflow

That provides 24/7 access to a secured portion of our database

Unlike the current ZIP file export/import model

Our solution is more stable, has a shorter cycle time, and increases transparency

Business Outcome Hypothesis

• contractors’ work is not delayed when enormous ZIP files sent via email crash
• project costs decrease when data is unlocked as soon as it is available
• data access is automatically logged

Leading Indicators

• email system is removed from workflow
• staff spend less time creating a secured portion of the database than assembling, sending and debugging ZIP files
• fewer payment disputes

Nonfunctional Requirements

• Relies on SSO to internal systems, which was recently approved for use by contractors

With this level of description contained in the product epics, stakeholders can easily access most of the information they need on a day-to-day basis.

When the product manager tags the stories associated with an epic, Tracker can display progress toward completion. A stakeholder will never be at a loss to provide a status update. And they have a low-barrier introduction to the power of Tracker!

Judy van Soldt is a Staff Product Manager at Pivotal Labs.

Category: Productivity

Tags: Agile Epics How to

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Evolving the Scaled Agile Framework:

Update to SAFe 5

Guidance for organizing around value, DevSecOps, and agility for business teams

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SAFe Glossary

The SAFe glossary is a set of definitions for all SAFe Big Picture elements.  The extended glossary provides definitions for additional terms used in the Framework. Some are unique to SAFe (e.g., PO Sync), while others are common in Lean-Agile development (e.g., MVP). They are provided here for clarity in their meaning in the context of SAFe. All extended glossary terms appear in the English configuration and will appear in other language configurations once translated.

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The 5 Whys is a proven problem-solving technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem as part of Inspect and Adapt.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance Criteria provide the information needed to ensure that a story, feature, or capability is implemented correctly and covers the relevant functionality and NFRs.

Acceptance Test Driven Development

Acceptance Test-Driven Development is a test-first, Agile testing practice synonymous with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).

Agile is a set of values, principles, and practices for iterative development most notably described by the Agile Manifesto.

Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto is the seminal Agile document describing the four values and twelve principles of Agile software development.

Agile Product Delivery

Agile Product Delivery is a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products and services to customers and users.

Agile Program Management Office

The Agile Program Management Office (APMO) is an organizational function responsible for facilitating the Lean Portfolio Management process and fostering operational excellence and lean governance as part of a Lean-Agile transformation.

Agile Release Train (ART)

The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, incrementally develops, delivers, and where applicable operates, one or more solutions in a value stream.

Agile Teams

In SAFe, an Agile team is a cross-functional group of 5-11 individuals who define, build, test, and deliver an increment of value in a short time box.

Architect Sync

The Architect Sync is a Solution Train event to ensure consistency in how emerging designs and tradeoffs are managed across the Solution Train, allowing frequent opportunities to steer implementation approaches without becoming a source of delays.

Architectural Runway

The Architectural Runway consists of the existing code, components, and technical infrastructure needed to implement near-term features without excessive redesign and delay.

The ART Sync is an ART event that combines the Product Owner (PO) Sync and Scrum of Scrums (SoS).

Backlog Refinement

Backlog Refinement is an activity held once or twice during the iteration or increment to discuss, estimate, and establish an initial understanding of acceptance criteria for upcoming stories in the team’s backlog.

Baseline Solution Investments (BSIs)

Baseline Solution Investments (BSIs) are those costs incurred by each value stream as it develops, supports, and operates the solutions that deliver current business capabilities.

Batch size is a measure of how much work (the requirements, designs, code, tests, and other work items) is pulled into the system during any given timebox.

Behavior-Driven Development

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a test-first, Agile testing practice that provides built-in quality by defining (and potentially automating) tests before, or as part of, specifying system behavior.

Benefit Hypothesis

The Benefit Hypothesis is the proposed measurable benefit to the end-user or business as part of a feature or capability.

Big Visible Information Radiator (BVIR)

A Big Visible Information Radiator (BVIR) is a graphical display that tracks and communicates critical data at a glance (e.g. burndown charts, program board, build status boards).

Built-In Quality

Built-In Quality practices ensure that each Solution element, at every increment, meets appropriate quality standards throughout development.

Burn-Down (Burn-Up) Chart

Burn-Down and Burn-Up Charts are graphical displays that show work progress versus time.

Business Agility

Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions.

Business and Technology

The Business and Technology icon in SAFe describes how functional domains in all parts of the enterprise enable business agility by continuously exploring new ways to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to their unique contexts.

Business Context

Business Context is a PI Planning agenda item presented by a business owner that describes the current state of the business, shares the portfolio vision, and presents a perspective on how effectively existing solutions are addressing current customer needs.

Business Owners

Business Owners are a small group of stakeholders who have the primary business and technical responsibility for governance, compliance, and return on investment (ROI) for a Solution developed by an Agile Release Train (ART). They are key stakeholders on the ART who must evaluate fitness for use and actively participate in certain ART events.

SAFe’s CALMR approach to DevOps is a mindset that guides ARTs toward achieving continuous value delivery by managing simultaneous advancements in delivery culture, automation, lean flow, measurement, and recovery.

Capabilities

A Capability is a higher-level solution behavior that typically spans multiple ARTs. Capabilities are sized and split into multiple features to facilitate their implementation in a single PI.

Capacity Allocation

Capacity Allocation is a lean budgeting guardrail for backlogs that helps balance the backlog of new features, enablers, and technical debt allocated to for upcoming Program Increment (PI).

Committed PI Objectives

The Committed PI Objectives are a set of SMART objectives that are created by each team with the business value assigned by the Business Owners.

Communities of Practice (CoPs)

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are organized groups of people who have a common interest in a specific technical or business domain. They collaborate regularly to share information, improve their skills, and actively work on advancing the general knowledge of the domain.

Compliance refers to a strategy and a set of activities and artifacts that allow teams to apply Lean-Agile development methods to build systems that have the highest possible quality, while simultaneously ensuring they meet any regulatory, industry, or other relevant standards.

Confidence Vote

The Confidence Vote is held near the end of PI Planning where the teams vote on their confidence in meeting PI objectives.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP)

The Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to shepherd a new piece of functionality from ideation to an on-demand release of value to the end user.

Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous Deployment (CD) is the process that takes validated Features in a staging environment and deploys them into the production environment, where they are readied for release.

Continuous Exploration (CE)

Continuous Exploration (CE) is the process that drives innovation and fosters alignment on what should be built by continually exploring market and customer needs, and defining a Vision, Roadmap, and set of Features for a Solution that addresses those needs.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of taking features from the Program Backlog and developing, testing, integrating, and validating them in a staging environment where they are ready for deployment and release.

Continuous Learning Culture

The Continuous Learning Culture competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation.

Core Values

The four Core Values of alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution represent the fundamental beliefs that are key to SAFe’s effectiveness. These guiding principles help dictate behavior and action for everyone who participates in a SAFe portfolio.

Cost of Delay

Cost of Delay (CoD) represents the money or value that will be lost by delaying or not doing a job for some time and is used in WSJF prioritization.

Customers are the ultimate beneficiaries of the value of the business solutions created and maintained by the portfolio value streams.

Customer Centricity

Customer centricity is a mindset and a way of doing business that focuses on creating positive experiences for the customer through the full set of products and services that the enterprise offers.

Customer Journey Map

A Customer Journey Map illustrates the experiences as a user engages with a company’s operational value stream, products, and services.

Daily Stand-Up

The Daily Stand Up (DSU) is a daily team event where each team member describes what they did yesterday to advance iteration goals, what they are going to work on today to achieve the iteration goals, and any blocks they are encountering in delivering iteration goals.

Decentralized Decision-Making

Decentralized Decision-Making grants decision authority to those closest to the knowledge and information to reduce delays, increase product development flow, and improve the quality of decisions.

Definition of Done

The Definition of Done communicates the completeness for an increment of value and creates a shared understanding of what work was completed as part of an Increment.

To deploy is to migrate a change from a pre-production environment to a production (or operational) environment, where it then awaits release.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle.

Develop on Cadence

Develop on Cadence is a coordinated set of practices that support Agile Teams by providing a reliable series of events and activities that occur on a regular, predictable schedule.

Development Value Streams

Development value streams (DVS) are the sequence of activities needed to convert a business hypothesis into a digitally-enabled Solution. Examples include designing a medical device or geophysical satellite, or developing and deploying a software application, SaaS system, or an e-commerce web site.

DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices. It provides communication, integration, automation, and close cooperation among all the people needed to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a Solution.

Empathy Map

An Empathy Map is a design thinking tool that helps teams develop deep, shared understanding for their customers.

An Enabler supports the activities needed to extend the Architectural Runway to provide future business functionality. These include exploration, architecture, infrastructure, and compliance. Enablers are captured in the various backlogs and occur throughout the Framework.

The Enterprise represents the business entity to which each SAFe portfolio belongs.

Enterprise Architect

The Enterprise Architect establishes a technology strategy and roadmap that enables a portfolio to support current and future business capabilities.

Enterprise Solution Delivery

The Enterprise Solution Delivery competency describes how to apply Lean-Agile principles and practices to the specification, development, deployment, operation, and evolution of the world’s largest and most sophisticated software applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems.

Epic Hypothesis Statement

The Epic Hypothesis Statement captures, organizes, and communicates critical information about an epic.

Epic Owners

Epic Owners are responsible for coordinating portfolio Epics through the Portfolio Kanban system. They collaboratively define the epic, its Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and Lean business case, and when approved, facilitate implementation.

An Epic is a container for a significant Solution development initiative that captures the more substantial investments that occur within a portfolio. Due to their considerable scope and impact, epics require the definition of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and approval by Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) before implementation.

Essential SAFe

Essential SAFe contains the minimal set of roles, events, and artifacts required to continuously deliver business solutions via an Agile Release Train (ART) as a Team of Agile Teams.

Estimating Poker

Estimating Poker is a collaborative technique for relatively estimating the size of stories, features, and WSJF in SAFe.

Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming (XP) is a set of Agile software engineering practices that improves software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements developed primarily by Kent Beck.

A Feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need. Each feature includes a benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria, and is sized or split as necessary to be delivered by a single Agile Release Train (ART) in a Program Increment (PI).

Final Plan Review

In the Final Plan Review activity of PI planning, teams present the final plans (PI objectives, load, risks) for communication to the ART and acceptance by the Business Owners.

The Foundation contains the supporting principles, values, mindset, implementation guidance, and leadership roles needed to deliver value successfully at scale.

Full SAFe is the most comprehensive configuration, including all seven core competencies needed for business agility.

Gemba is the place where the work is performed and where teams can observe how stakeholders execute the steps and specific activities in their operational value streams to better identify opportunities for relentless improvement.

Hackathons are innovation events where team members can work on whatever they want, with whomever they want, so long as the work reflects the mission of the company and they demo their work to others at the end of the Hackathon.

Innovation and Planning Iteration

The Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration occurs every Program Increment (PI) and serves multiple purposes. It acts as an estimating buffer for meeting PI Objectives and provides dedicated time for innovation, continuing education, PI Planning, and Inspect and Adapt (I&A) events.

Inspect & Adapt (I&A)

The Inspect and Adapt (I&A) is a significant event, held at the end of each Program Increment (PI), where the current state of the Solution is demonstrated and evaluated by the train. Teams then reflect and identify improvement backlog items via a structured, problem-solving workshop.

Integration Point

An Integration Point creates a ‘pull event’ that pulls the various solution elements into an integrated whole that helps stakeholders assure that the evolving solution address real and future business needs

Investment Horizons

Investment Horizons highlight spending allocations for solutions that are created by the value streams that help value stream owners and fiduciaries make more informed investment decisions and aligns the portfolio with strategic themes while promoting overall health and growth.

Iterations are the basic building block of Agile development. Each iteration is a standard, fixed-length timebox, where Agile Teams deliver incremental value in the form of working, tested software and systems. In SAFe, iterations are typically one or two weeks in length, with two being the most common.

Iteration Execution

Iteration Execution is how Agile Teams manage their work throughout the Iteration timebox, resulting in a high-quality, working, tested system increment.

Iteration Goals

Iteration Goals are a high-level summary of the business and technical goals that the Agile Team agrees to accomplish in an Iteration. They are vital to coordinating an Agile Release Train (ART) as a self-organizing, self-managing team of teams.

Iteration Planning

Iteration Planning is an event where all team members determine how much of the Team Backlog they can commit to delivering during an upcoming Iteration. The team summarizes the work as a set of committed Iteration Goals.

Iteration Retrospective

The Iteration Retrospective is a regular event where Agile Team members discuss the results of the Iteration, review their practices, and identify ways to improve.

Iteration Review

The Iteration Review is a cadence-based event, where each team inspects the increment at the end of every Iteration to assess progress, and then adjusts its backlog for the next iteration.

Knowledge Worker

Knowledge Workers are people who have the skill, expertise, and education needed to solve complex problems in their domain of concern.

Large Solution SAFe

Large Solution SAFe describes additional roles, practices, and guidance to build and evolve the world’s largest applications, networks, and cyber-physical systems.

Lead Time is the time it takes from when the work was done in the previous step until it’s done in the current step.

Lean is a body of knowledge and set of practices to improve efficiency and effectiveness by reducing delays and eliminating non-value-added activities.

Lean Budget Guardrails

Lean Budget Guardrails describe the policies and practices for budgeting, spending, and governance for a specific portfolio.

Lean Budgets

Lean Budgets is a Lean-Agile approach to financial governance which increases throughput and productivity by reducing the overhead and costs associated with project cost accounting.

Lean Business Case

A Lean Business Case (LBC) is a light-weight approach to describing epics, including their MVPs and projected business value.

Lean Governance

Lean Governance is one dimension of Lean Portfolio Management that supports oversight and decision-making of spending, audit and compliance, forecasting expenses, and measurement.

Lean Portfolio Management

The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance.

Lean Quality Management System (QMS)

A Quality Management System (QMS) dictates practices, policies, and procedures needed to confirm safety and efficacy. SAFe organizations move from traditional to Lean QMS governance.

Lean User Experience (Lean UX)

Lean User Experience (Lean UX) design is a mindset, culture, and a process that embraces Lean-Agile methods. It implements functionality in minimum viable increments and determines success by measuring results against a benefit hypothesis.

Lean-Agile Center of Excellence

The Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a small team of people dedicated to implementing the SAFe Lean-Agile way of working.

Lean-Agile Leadership

The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential.

Lean-Agile Mindset

The Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of SAFe leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking. It’s the personal, intellectual, and leadership foundation for adopting and applying SAFe principles and practices.

Lean-Agile Principles

SAFe is based on ten immutable, underlying Lean-Agile principles. These tenets and economic concepts inspire and inform the roles and practices of SAFe.

Little’s Law

Little’s Law is the law of queuing theory and states that the average wait time for service from a system equals the ratio of the average queue length divided by the average processing rate.

Measure and Grow

Measure and Grow is the way portfolios evaluate their progress towards business agility and determine their next improvement steps.

Metrics are agreed-upon measures used to evaluate how well the organization is progressing toward the portfolio, large solution, ART, and Agile team’s business and technical objectives.

Milestones are used to track progress toward a specific goal or event. There are three types of SAFe milestones: Program Increment (PI), fixed-date, and learning milestones.

Minimum Marketable Feature

The Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) is the minimum functionality that the teams can build to learn whether the feature’s benefit hypothesis is valid or not.

Minimum Viable Product

In SAFe, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an early and minimal version of a new product or business solution that is used to prove or disprove the epic hypothesis. As opposed to storyboards, prototypes, mockups, wireframes, and other exploratory techniques, the MVP is an actual product used by real customers to generate validated learning.

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is the practice of developing a set of related system models that help define, design, and document a system under development. These models provide an efficient way to explore, update, and communicate system aspects to stakeholders, while significantly reducing or eliminating dependence on traditional documents.

Modified Fibonacci Sequence

A Modified Fibonacci Sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100) is used during relative estimating to reflect the inherent uncertainty as the size of the job being estimated gets bigger.

Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs)

Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) define system attributes such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, and usability. They serve as constraints or restrictions on the design of the system across the different backlogs.

Objectives and Key Results

In SAFe, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can be used to define, organize, and communicate critical information about a strategic theme and track its progress through concrete, specific, and measurable actions.

Operational Value Streams

Operational value streams (OVS) are the sequence of activities needed to deliver a product or service to a customer. Examples include manufacturing a product, fulfilling an order, admitting and treating a medical patient, providing a loan, or delivering a professional service.

Organizational Agility

The Organizational Agility competency describes how Lean-thinking people and Agile teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt the organization as needed to capitalize on new opportunities.

Organizational Change Management

Organizational Change Management is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change.

Pareto Analysis

Pareto Analysis is a technique used during an Inspect & Adapt event to narrow down the number of actions that produce the most significant overall effect.

Participatory Budgeting

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is the process that Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) uses to allocate the total portfolio budget to its value streams.

Personas are fictional consumers and/or users derived from customer research that drive a customer-centric approach to product development.

Phase Gates are traditional governance milestones that are replaced in SAFe by milestones based on objective evaluation of working systems.

PI Objectives

Program Increment (PI) Objectives are a summary of the business and technical goals that an Agile Team or train intends to achieve in the upcoming Program Increment (PI).

Plan-Do-Check-Adjust

Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) is an iterative, four-step method used for controlling variability and making adjustments in response to feedback during product development.

A SAFe portfolio aligns strategy to execution via a collection of development value streams. Operating under a common governance model, each value stream provides one or more solutions the enterprise needs to accomplish its business mission.

Portfolio Backlog

The Portfolio Backlog is the highest-level backlog in SAFe. It provides a holding area for upcoming business and enabler Epics intended to create and evolve a comprehensive set of Solutions.

Portfolio Canvas

The Portfolio Canvas defines the development value streams that are included in a SAFe portfolio, the value propositions and the solutions they deliver, the customers they serve, the budgets allocated to each value stream, and other key activities and events required to achieve the portfolio vision.

Portfolio Kanban

The Portfolio Kanban system is a method to visualize and manage the flow of portfolio Epics, from ideation through analysis, implementation, and completion.

Portfolio SAFe

Portfolio SAFe aligns strategy with execution and organizes solution development around the flow of value through one or more value streams.

Portfolio Vision

The Portfolio Vision is a description of the future state of a portfolio’s Value Streams and Solutions and describes how they will cooperate to achieve the portfolio’s objectives and the broader aim of the Enterprise.

Pre-and Post-PI Planning

Pre– and Post–Program Increment (PI) Planning events are used to prepare for, and follow up after, PI Planning for Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and Suppliers in a Solution Train.

Problem-Solving Workshop

The Problem Solving Workshop is part of the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event and is a structured approach to finding the root cause of systemic problems.

Product Management

Product Management is responsible for defining desirable, viable, feasible, and sustainable solutions that meet customer needs and for supporting development across the entire product life cycle.

Product Owner (PO)

The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team who is responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the team and ensuring that the Team Backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs.

Product Owner (PO) Sync

The PO Sync is an ART event to get visibility into how well the ART is progressing toward meeting its PI objectives, to discuss problems or opportunities with feature development, and to assess any scope adjustments.

Program Backlog

The Program Backlog is the holding area for upcoming Features, which are intended to address user needs and deliver business benefits for a single Agile Release Train (ART). It also contains the enabler features necessary to build the Architectural Runway.

Program Board

The Program Board highlights the PI’s feature delivery dates, feature dependencies among teams, and relevant milestones.

Program Increment (PI)

A Program Increment (PI) is a timebox during which an Agile Release Train (ART) delivers incremental value in the form of working, tested software and systems. PIs are typically 8 – 12 weeks long. The most common pattern for a PI is four development Iterations, followed by one Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration.

Program Increment (PI) Planning

Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision.

Program Kanban

The Program and Solution Kanban systems are a method to visualize and manage the flow of Features and Capabilities from ideation to analysis, implementation, and release through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

Program Predictability Measure

The Program Predictability Measure summarizes the planned vs. actual business values for all the teams on the ART and is a key indicator of the ART’s performance and reliability.

Program Risks

Program Risks are identified by the teams during PI Planning and represent risks and impediments that could impact their ability to meet their objectives.

Refactoring

Refactoring is the activity of improving the internal structure or operation of a code or component without changing its external behavior.

Relative Estimation

Relative Estimation compares jobs to one another to quickly estimate their size and value.

To release is to make functionality that has been deployed to a production (or operational) environment available for use by a defined set of end-users or systems.

Release on Demand

Release on Demand is the process that deploys new functionality into production and releases it immediately or incrementally to customers based on demand.

Release Train Engineer (RTE)

The Release Train Engineer (RTE) is a servant leader and coach for the Agile Release Train (ART). The RTE’s major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement.

Relentless Improvement

Relentless Improvement is the fourth pillar of the SAFe House of Lean and encourages learning and growth through continuous reflection and process enhancements.

The Roadmap is a schedule of events and Milestones that communicate planned Solution deliverables over a planning horizon.

ROAMing Risks

Risk ROAMing is a PI planning activity where program risks raised by teams are addressed in a broader management context.

Root Cause Analysis

A Root Cause Analysis applies a set of problem-solving tools to identify the actual causes of a problem as part of the Inspect and Adapt event.

SAFe Big Picture (BP)

The SAFe Big Picture (BP) is a visual representation of the framework’s primary roles, activities, and artifacts used to access SAFe articles through its clickable icons when viewed from scaledagileframework.com

SAFe for Government

SAFe for Government is a set of success patterns that help public sector organizations implement Lean-Agile practices in a government context.

SAFe for Lean Enterprises

SAFe for Lean Enterprises is the world’s leading framework for business agility. SAFe integrates the power of Lean, Agile, and DevOps into a comprehensive operating system that helps enterprises thrive in the digital age by delivering innovative products and services faster, more predictably, and with higher quality.

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap consists of an overview graphic and a 12-article series that describes a strategy and an ordered set of activities that have proven to be effective in successfully implementing SAFe.

SAFe Lean Startup Cycle

The SAFe Lean Startup cycle is a highly iterative build-measure-learn cycle for product innovation and strategic investments. This strategy for implementing epics provides the economic and strategic advantages of a Lean startup by managing investment and risk incrementally while leveraging the flow and visibility benefits of SAFe.

SAFe Program Consultants (SPCs)

Certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPCs) are change agents who combine their technical knowledge of SAFe with an intrinsic motivation to improve the company’s software and systems development processes. They play a critical role in successfully implementing SAFe. SPCs come from numerous internal or external roles, including business and technology leaders, portfolio/program/project managers, process leads, architects, analysts, and consultants.

Scrum Master

SAFe Scrum Masters are servant leaders and coaches for an Agile Team. They help educate the team in Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, and SAFe, ensuring that the agreed Agile process is followed. They also help remove impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement.

Scrum of Scrums

The Scrum of Scrums (SoS) is an ART event that helps coordinate ART dependencies and provides visibility into progress and impediments.

SAFe ScrumXP is an Agile Team method used by Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to plan, execute, retrospect, and deliver customer value in a short time box. It combines the power of Scrum with Extreme Programming (XP) practices.

Set-Based Design

Set-Based Design (SBD) is a practice that keeps requirements and design options flexible for as long as possible during the development process. Instead of choosing a single point solution upfront, SBD identifies and simultaneously explores multiple options, eliminating poorer choices over time. It enhances flexibility in the design process by committing to technical solutions only after validating assumptions, which produces better economic results.

Shared Services

Shared Services represents the specialty roles, people, and services required for the success of an Agile Release Train (ART) or Solution Train, but that cannot be dedicated full-time.

Silos are functionally-aligned organizational constructs that locally optimize for specialists with policies and procedures that ensure repeatable, efficient operations within the functional unit without understanding the larger flow of value across functional units.

Each development value stream develops one or more Solutions, which are products, services, or systems delivered to the customer, whether internal or external to the Enterprise.

Solution Architect/Engineering

Solution Architect/Engineering is responsible for defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision across a Solution Train to help ensure the system or Solution under development is fit for its intended purpose.

Solution Backlog

The Solution Backlog is the holding area for upcoming Capabilities and Enablers, each of which can span multiple ARTs and is intended to advance the Solution and build its architectural runway.

Solution Context

Solution Context identifies critical aspects of the operational environment for a Solution. It provides an essential understanding of requirements, usage, installation, operation, and support of the solution itself. Solution context heavily influences opportunities and constraints for releasing on demand.

Solution Demo

The Solution Demo integrates the development efforts from all ARTs and suppliers on the Solution Train every PI and makes them visible to Customers and other stakeholders for evaluation and feedback.

Solution Intent

Solution Intent is the repository for storing, managing, and communicating the knowledge of current and intended Solution behavior. Where required, this includes both fixed and variable specifications and designs; reference to applicable standards, system models, and functional and nonfunctional tests; and traceability.

Solution Management

Solution Management is responsible for defining and supporting the building of desirable, feasible, viable and sustainable large scale business solutions that meet customer needs over time.

Solution Train

The Solution Train is the organizational construct used to build large and complex Solutions that require the coordination of multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs), as well as the contributions of Suppliers. It aligns ARTs with a shared business and technology mission using the solution Vision, Backlog, and Roadmap, and an aligned Program Increment (PI).

Solution Train Engineer (STE)

The Solution Train Engineer (STE) is a servant leader and coach for the Solution Train, facilitating and guiding the work of all ARTs and Suppliers in the Value Stream.

Spanning Palette

The Spanning Palette contains various roles and artifacts that may apply to a specific team, program, large solution, or portfolio context.

A Spike is a type of exploration Enabler Story that gains the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk of a technical approach, better understand a requirement, or increase the reliability of a story estimate.

Sprint is a term that comes from the Scrum method and is synonymous with the term Iteration in SAFe.

Stories are short descriptions of a small piece of desired functionality, written in the user’s language. Agile Teams implement small, vertical slices of system functionality and are sized so they can be completed in a single Iteration.

A Story Map is a design thinking technique that organizes a sequence of stories according to the tasks a user needs to accomplish their goal.

Story Point

A Story Point is a singular number used in relative estimating that represents a combination of quantities: volume, complexity, knowledge, and uncertainty.

Strategic Themes

Strategic Themes are differentiating business objectives that connect a portfolio to the strategy of the Enterprise. They influence portfolio strategy and provide business context for portfolio decision-making.

Sunk Costs refers to money already spent, which should be ignored when making future investment decisions to pivot effectively.

A Supplier is an internal or external organization that develops and delivers components, subsystems, or services that help Solution Trains and Agile Release Trains provide Solutions to their Customers.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning technique used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to the current business situation as part of a SAFe portfolio vision.

System Architect/Engineering

System Architect/Engineering is responsible for defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision for an Agile Release Train (ART) to help ensure the system or Solution under development is fit for its intended purpose.

System Demo

The System Demo is a significant event that provides an integrated view of new Features for the most recent Iteration delivered by all the teams in the Agile Release Train (ART). Each demo gives ART stakeholders an objective measure of progress during a Program Increment (PI).

System Team

The System Team is a specialized Agile Team that assists in building and supporting the Agile development environment, typically including development and maintenance of the toolchain that supports the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. The System Team may also support the integration of assets from Agile teams, perform end-to-end Solution testing where necessary, and assists with deployment and Release on Demand.

Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking takes a holistic approach to solution development, incorporating all aspects of a system and its environment into the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of the system itself.

Team and Technical Agility

The Team and Technical Agility competency describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices that high-performing Agile teams and Teams of Agile teams use to create high-quality solutions for their customers.

Team Backlog

The Team Backlog contains user and enabler Stories that originate from the Program Backlog, as well as stories that arise locally from the team’s local context. It may include other work items as well, representing all the things a team needs to do to advance their portion of the system.

Team Kanban

Team Kanban is a method that helps teams facilitate the flow of value by visualizing workflow, establishing Work In Process (WIP) limits, measuring throughput, and continuously improving their process.

Team Topologies

Team Topologies define four organization types that provide a clear model for organizing Agile teams and ARTs.

Technical Debt

Technical Debt reflects the implied cost and accumulating interest of future work that is commonly caused by knowingly or unknowingly choosing a suboptimal or incomplete solution.

Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a mindset and practice that involves building and executing tests before implementing the code or a component of a system.

TOWs Analysis

TOWS Analysis is used in conjunction with a SWOT analysis to help identify strategic options to create a better future state as part of a SAFe portfolio vision.

U-curve Optimization

The U-curve Optimization for batch size determines the optimal batch size by balancing transaction costs and holding costs.

Uncommitted Objectives

Uncommitted Objectives help improve the predictability of delivering business value since they are not included in the team’s commitment or counted against teams in the program predictability measure. Teams can apply uncommitted objectives whenever there is low confidence in meeting the objective.

Value represents the benefits an enterprise delivers to its customers and stakeholders and appears in different contexts in SAFe.

Value Stream Coordination

Value Stream Coordination defines how to manage dependencies and exploit the opportunities that exist only in the interconnections between value streams.

Value Stream Identification

Value Stream Identification is an activity that portfolios use to identify development value streams and the operational value streams they support.

Value Stream KPIs

Value Stream Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the quantifiable measures used to evaluate how a value stream is performing against its forecasted business outcomes.

Value Stream Management (VSM)

Value Stream Management is a leadership and technical discipline that enables maximum flow of business value through the end-to-end solution delivery life cycle.

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping is an essential tool to improve the flow of value across the continuous delivery pipeline by providing the visibility needed to identify bottlenecks and problem areas to flow that cause delays.

Value Streams

Value Streams represent the series of steps that an organization uses to implement Solutions that provide a continuous flow of value to a customer.

Velocity is equal to the sum of the points for all the completed stories that met their Definition of Done (DoD).

The Vision is a description of the future state of the Solution under development. It reflects customer and stakeholder needs, as well as the Feature and Capabilities proposed to meet those needs.

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a prioritization model used to sequence jobs (for example, Features, Capabilities, and Epics) to produce maximum economic benefit. In SAFe, WSJF is estimated as the Cost of Delay (CoD) divided by the job duration.

Work in Process

Work in Process (WIP) represents partially completed work. Having too much WIP confuses priorities, causes frequent context switching, and increases overhead.

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SAFe lean business case template

By scaled agile, inc..

Create a lean business case for your portfolio epic based on SAFe agile practices

Having one standardized and organized method to keep track of all of your portfolio epics is essential to successful  lean portfolio management . Moreover, adopting SAFe practices allows you to manage opportunities and risks via lean business cases that are implemented through the  build-measure-learn SAFe Lean Startup Cycle . With this template, you’ll be able to document a business case based on a benefit hypothesis and a defined MVP, rather than a speculative ROI that would require the full potential investment. With Confluence, you can organize all of your portfolio epic documentation in one space, making it easy to analyze inputs, record decisions, and keep everyone aligned to a common objective. Read more on the  SAFe epic article .

How to use the SAFe lean business case template

Step 1. determine the scope and details of the epic..

The creation of the business case is usually the primary responsibility of the epic owner. Before diving into the creation of your lean business case, set the stage for this portfolio epic. Make sure you are creating the lean business case at the right time. It is part of the analyzing phase of the  portfolio Kanban  system. Too early would create waste, and too late risks making investments without understanding the context. First, decide who will be involved in the proposal, to ensure that all sponsoring stakeholders are included. Then, concisely describe the epic, define how the success of the epic will be measured in the Business Outcomes Hypothesis, and establish what leading indicators will be used to indicate progress. This will help you determine the scope of the epic, and most importantly, how to define your MVP. Make sure to include any background analyses you conducted, and leave space to capture the final go/no-go recommendation.

Step 2. Create the lean business case.

Once you’ve laid down the groundwork, you’re ready to write the lean business case. Start by using the  Epic Hypothesis Statement  to describe the epic. This provides a short and concise way to define the business rationale, or the “why” of this Epic. Then define what is in and out of scope for this epic, as well as any nonfunctional requirements. Then define the MVP that will be used to test the hypothesis, as well as potential features this MVP will spawn Estimate the cost, preferably in the same currency used to run  participatory budgeting . Don’t forget to provide an estimate of the overall cost of the Epic, once the MVP is successful. Lastly, document the kind of value return that is expected from the investment in the epic.

Step 3. Document any supporting data.

Document the solution analysis that was carried out during the analyzing phase. Reference any additional resources, links, and supporting evidence so other team members and stakeholders can access it easily. Ensure that the attachments are labeled, using the Notes and Comments section to jot down any miscellaneous evidence. All of this informs the upcoming go/no-go decision. Be careful of information overload. The lean business case was created to make the process of laying out a business case faster and to make the review process easier. Attaching too many support documents in this field can slow down the reviewers and negate some of the benefits.  Alternatively, this space can be used to document notes during your team planning meetings.

Step 4. Keep the epic up to date.

As analysis and implementation of the MVP continue, keep the lean business case up to date to facilitate any portfolio review meetings or future portfolio funding.

Through courses, trainings, partners, and solutions, Scaled Agile, Inc. provides practices for scaling agile practices across the entire company. Through SAFe, they empower large and complex organizations to achieve the benefits of Lean-Agile at scale.

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