Many organizations still rely on annual planning cycles with large upfront budgets, waterfall-style gate reviews, and business cases that are written solely to secure funding. The result is often a massive overload of initiatives, poor quality, delayed projects, and a fundamental disconnect between output and actual business impact. In this talk, my colleague and I share how we introduced Lean Portfolio Management at Zühlke Engineering, what we achieved in our first MVP after six months, and where we plan to go next.
Is DevOps really the reason why testing and quality assurance (QA) employees are being increasingly automated out of a job? Pia Wiedermayer, Head of QA, and Romano Roth, Head of DevOps, discuss different ways to incorporate the wealth of experience of testing and QA specialists into the agile team culture.
Deploy is a critical step in the SAFe for DevOps Health Radar. After we have built a deployable package and tested it in a staging environment, we now want to continuously deploy our changes into the production environment. The goal is to deploy with high frequency and low risk. In this video, I explain how we achieve this and what practices enable continuous deployment.
This is the English-language version of our talk on participatory budgeting at Zühlke. Nadine Broghammer and I describe how we coached a portfolio team through a participatory budgeting (PB) event based on SAFe, and how the value stream leads collectively allocated the budget for the second half of the year. A separate post covers the German version of the same talk.
Stage is the step in the SAFe for DevOps Health Radar where we perform the final validation before going to production. In the staging environment, we run user acceptance tests, conduct system demos for our stakeholders, and verify that everything is truly production-ready. In this video, I walk through what the Stage step involves and why it is essential for a reliable delivery pipeline.
In this article, I explain what Test End to End means within the SAFe® DevOps Health Radar and why it is essential for delivering high-quality software. Please note that everything discussed here is under the license of Scaled Agile, and that the Scaled Agile Framework is a framework to be used as a toolbox. Take out what fits your needs or what solves your problem.
Build is the step in the SAFe for DevOps Health Radar where committed code is continuously integrated, tested, and turned into a deployable artifact with built-in quality. In this video, I walk through what the Build step involves, why continuous integration matters, and how techniques like gated commits and static security analysis help you maintain quality at speed.
In the SAFe DevOps Health Radar, Develop is where we take the features from continuous exploration and turn them into working code. We split features into user stories, implement them with a strong focus on built-in quality, and commit everything to version control. In this video, I walk through the Develop step and explain why quality practices like TDD and BDD are so important.
In this article, I explain what Continuous Exploration is within the SAFe DevOps Health Radar and why it is essential for building the right thing in the right way. Please note that everything discussed here is under the license of Scaled Agile, and that the Scaled Agile Framework is a framework to be used as a toolbox. Take out of this toolbox what fits your needs and what solves your problems.
In this video, I explain what Synthesize is and how it works within the SAFe DevOps Health Radar. Synthesize is the fourth and final step of Continuous Exploration, where we combine the outputs of Hypothesize, Collaborate and Research, and Architect into a prioritized backlog with a clear vision and roadmap.
Architect is the third step in the SAFe DevOps Health Radar, part of Continuous Exploration. In this video, I explain how we define the minimal architecture needed to prove a hypothesis and enable continuous delivery of value to customers.
Collaborate & Research is the second step in the SAFe DevOps Health Radar. In this video, I explain how teams collaborate internally and conduct market research to define a minimal feature set that validates the hypothesis from the previous step.
