What-is-Scale.md

We bring SAFe to Azure DevOps!

With the @Scale extension your Azure DevOps project will be enriched to include the terms, concepts and tools from SAFe. @Scale extends Azure DevOps to support program increment planning with a program board to commit and plan features and dependencies, use the risk board to identify and ROAM risks and use the objectives tool to define measurable objectives.

Dependency management using a program board

Working together at scale requires increased visibility into what others are doing. @Scale adds an interactive program board to make documenting and sharing that information easier. The program board helps teams understand constraints and identify critical paths with a clear visualization of dependences.

• Quickly document planning. The program board lets you easily add features directly to the board or map them from an existing backlog.
• Share increment overview. With a digital program board anyone can look at the result from the increment planning.
• Visualize dependencies. The program board shows dependencies between features and it's really easy to add new by dropping cards on each other to make a connection.

Delivery timeline/Roadmaps

Scale also lets you visualize the time spent work items instead of being tied to iterations. @Scale can easily be toggled to enable start & target date on work items. Now you're able to see when a feature starts and when it's planned to end.

• Share your roadmap. Scale enables you to visualize an increment or even a longer period of work.
• Drag and drop. Use our user interface to drag and drop to set the start & target date for work items.
• Visualize time. Visualize how long something will take instead of just showing the expected delivery iteration.

Objectives management

Goal setting is key to keep focus on the most important things. In @Scale you can set goals at ART level or per team by using Objectives. Set the planned business value (BV) when planning the increment and follow up during the execution. You can also associate objectives with items on the program board to give additional insights into the development progress. Use Scale for

• Documenting PI and Team PI Objectives. An important part of measuring performance and delivery precision is to set objectives for the PIs and then measure the outcome.
• Measure achievement and delivery. Use business value to measure outcome and monitor progress using Feature completion by linking objectives to features.

Risk management

Risk management is an important part of the planning work. During PI planning the teams states risks and impediments to the RTE. @Scale provides a board where the team efficiently manages risks, both during planning and later to track the risks during the increment.

Project-level risks are visualized in a ROAM board where the teams can manage risks found during planning. Backed by work items in Azure DevOps the risks can be assigned to owners and the documentation and change history is consistently handled.

• Visualize and manage risks. During the PI planning risks are easily shared by using the risk board. Later during the ROAM exercise the teams and business owners find ways to manage the risks before committing to the plan for the next increment.
• Customize columns. Create a board that suits your team. Use the ROAM acronym, custom states or risk levels - the risk board can be customized to your way of working.

Analytics

Azure DevOps provides may analytics capabilities and with @Scale you get additional analytics reports specific to SAFe. Quick insights into project status is essential, @Scale shows metrics that matters in your SAFe planning, including

• Program Predictability. The chart show actual business value achieved compared to planned business value.
• Solution Train Predictability. Sums the PI level performance metric as the average outcome for each release train.

Priorotize using the WSJF-model

Prioritizing the right things to focus on is just as important as planning execution. Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a prioritization model used to sequence jobs (eg., Features, Capabilities, and Epics) to produce maximum economic benefit. In SAFe, WSJF is estimated as the Cost of Delay (CoD) divided by job size.

With @Scale user friendly WSJF function, You can now focus on the important things and facilitate estimation while @Scale automatically calculates the WSJF-score when dragging and dropping cards.

Process alignment

Alignment of agile teams is important when working at scale, but it can be time-consuming to maintain. @Scale extends Azure DevOps with process enhancements to make it easer to get started and keep going. In @Scale we've also added tooling for additional planning concepts and artifacts introduced by SAFe, such as release trains, program increments and objectives.

• Custom Azure DevOps SAFe process template. We bring a SAFe process template to Azure DevOps so you don't have to spend time coming up with one on your own.
• Automating configuration of Azure DevOps projects. It should be easy to get started so we provide a guided configuration process that automatically adds the artifacts used in the SAFe framework, for instance agile release trains, program increments and objectives.

When working at scale repeatable tasks can easily become significant chores, so in the spirit of lean principles we want to automate what we can to remove waste.

• Definition of context. In @Scale you define who works together so relevant information can be kept in focus for the teams. In SAFe we define the agile release trains, ARTs, as the logical unit of connecting who works on what when.
• Order teams. Set the order or the teams to match how you want them displayed on the board.
• Add dependent teams. Dependent teams can be added to the ART if you want to track dependencies between delivery teams and shared teams.
• Automating creation of Program Increments and Sprints. Tools should support and not be in the way, in agile there are a lot of recurring tasks that @Scale tries to automate.