The Agile development approach as described in the Agile Manifesto, has greatly improved the efficiency of software development in many small to medium sized projects around the world. By connecting development teams with product owners, customers, and gaining continuous feedback with continuously delivered functionality, the Agile approach has transformed software engineering and development.
On the other hand, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approach, in trying to apply the Agile method to enterprise scale, with teams of teams and scrums or scrums, and release trains etc. has only recreated the waterfall method with new names and designations. The crux of the Agile approach is lost with SAFe. There is no logical reason why Agile should work with large systems development but nevertheless it is being attempted in some cases just so an enterprise can claim to be agile. However, once the connection with the customer is broken and truly useful complete functionality to the end user is no longer what is being delivered, the approach will no longer reap the benefits of the Agile method.
Maybe instead of trying to scale up the Agile approach we should instead be looking at how to scale down large projects into sizes that will work with the Agile method and then leave the integration of these smaller systems to methodologies designed for such.
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