Benefits and Challenges of Adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): Preliminary Results from a Multivocal Literature Review

• Published in: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement Vol. 11271; pp. 334 - 351
• Main Authors: Putta, Abheeshta, Paasivaara, Maria, Lassenius, Casper
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Agile software development; Large-scale agile software development; SAFe; Scaled agile framework
• ISBN: 3030036723; 9783030036720
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_24

Over the past few years, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has been adopted by a large number of organizations to scale agile to large enterprises. At the moment, SAFe seems to be the most predominant agile scaling framework. Despite the current popularity of SAFe in the software intensive industry, there exists surprisingly little scientific research on the benefits and challenges of SAFe adoption. To collect the existing knowledge on this topic, we conducted a multivocal literature review, which includes both peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed case studies and experience reports on organizations that have adopted SAFe. We identified 52 unique organisations adopting SAFe, five from the scientific literature and 47 from the grey literature. The most salient benefit categories were: transparency, alignment, productivity, predictability and time to market. The most frequently mentioned challenge categories were: change resistance, challenges with the first program increment planning and moving away from agile.