Let's start the new year with a rant on SAFe. (Hey, low-hanging fruit ). SAFe is a perfectly good process, but it's in no way an Agile process. We could start with "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." SAFE is clearly very process heavy. 1/6

That comes with too much complexity, which flies in the face of "Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential." Then there's "Responding to change over following a plan". Planning is a big part of SAFe, and the plans are much too long range. 2/6

The whole notion of a PI is a waterfall concept with an up-front plan. I could go on. SAFe violates most of the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. 3/6

I'm not saying that SAFe isn't an improvement over chaos. People who say "it works" are not wrong because they're comparing it to the things they did before, which definitely did not work. SAFe is hardly the panacea most of the big corps who adopt it think it is, however. 4/6

It's designed to fit the corporate mindset, not to develop software. Adopting it is comfortable, because the orgs don't have to make the significant and uncomfortable changes to the org structure required by Agile. 5/6

Finally, none of the large orgs that consider themselves software orgs (Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, SalesForce, &c.) use SAFe. There's a reason for that. 6/6