A Quality Assurance vision for SAFe

Considering the relentless pace at which customers expect new products, services, and apps to be delivered, it’s no wonder that to get to market fast, many organizations are implementing their Agile delivery method ‘@scale’. Giving customers what they want, when they want it is nothing new. After all, customer centricity and the tools that are used for it have been around for decades. I’m talking about tools like SWOT analysis, customer journeys, personas, etc. Until now, however, such tools haven’t been incorporated into one of the best-known Agile models, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®). 

That’s all changed in SAFe® 5.0. Here, we see customer centricity sitting at the heart of the framework. At Sogeti, we believe this is vital. That’s because an optimized customer experience delivers optimal customer value. And integral to this optimized customer experience is quality. 

After all, customers vote with their feet (or wallets) and if the quality falls short, the damage is done. That’s why we advocate embedding Quality Assurance (QA) and testing at depth in the end-to-end lifecycle of all software and systems. However, as I discuss in a new Point of View, while QA is mentioned within SAFe®, for example organizing the production process, it is not elaborated in detail.

While this makes sense to a certain degree, since every SAFe® implementation is unique, in A QA vision within SAFe® I argue that as the volume of SAFe® implementations continues to grow, QA and testing cannot be ignored. QA and testing approaches such as Sogeti’s TMAP® provide the good practices for test management, execution and QA through which trust is engendered in the quality of the products (apps, systems, services) and their ability to support business processes.

Thus, the task at hand is how best to practically implement SAFe® and, at the same time, achieve the right level of quality. The very quality that keeps customers loyal.

So, A QA vision within SAFe® offers guidance to people embracing SAFe® by providing a theoretical mapping of our own Sogeti Quality Values to specific SAFe® topics. Together, these provide a framework for scaled Agile QA and testing to be done the right way. I argue that given SAFe® only addresses QA and testing at a high level, there is an imperative to look beyond it for proven approaches to embedding quality engineering across the lifecycle, such as TMAP®.

From who does what (and how) in a SAFe® scrum process, to how QA is employed at the different levels of cooperation in SAFe® implementations, the Point of View offers a  new perspective on QA-related topics in the context of customer centricity in SAFe®.

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