Agile

What is agile?

Agile is an iterative product development approach used to organize work into consumable, incremental "sprints" to deliver value to customers faster. This was a huge movement from large-scale, year-long waterfall style projects to something small and quickly delivered in weeks. To be fair, it's not like everything is built in two weeks and ready to ship, but the idea around having continuous improvement and something that is working within two weeks was revolutionary.

How was agile created?

In 2001, a group of software development professionals met in Snowbird, Utah, to discuss the future of creating software products. The outcome of their meeting was a simple, 68-word document that became known as the Agile Manifesto.

What is an agile team?

An agile team is a group of employees (maybe even some contractors) that are working together on an agile project. They are likely from different departments, making them cross-functional, and are typically only assigned to the single agile project. 

In most cases, teams are using the Scrum framework. A team would consist of the following members:

• Product owner
• Scrum master
• Team members, like developers, test engineers, and designers
  

What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?

Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe, is a workflow for actually implementing agile practices at a scale of an enterprise organization. It's like a package, or what people in project management call a "book of knowledge" for adopting agile at a scale of enterprise or a big company. The book of knowledge contains: core values and principles, 12 steps for implementing SAFe, roles and responsibilities, and guides for how to plan and manage work.