Hello,

As you know, Built-in Quality is one of SAFe’s four core values. Without it, ‘scaling Agile’ by any means is a house of cards with no true agile foundation that will fall the first time users put weight on our big, new, important system. That’s why SAFe provides significant guidance around the current and evolving technical software engineering practices.

One element of that is Ken Pugh’s Video Blog series on Agile Software Engineering.  In it, Ken shows how thinking test-first, achieving flow, and realizing a balanced test portfolio makes software easier to understand, faster to modify, and more reliable to deliver. He then describes the software engineering best practices that help achieve these goals including Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), scenario modeling, design patterns, refactoring, coding practices, and many others.  All of these practices support Built-in Quality, one of the SAFe Core Values, and many of them are further described in various SAFe articles. I think it’s fair to say that any group creating a continuous delivery pipeline that supports release on demand must learn and apply these practices to their context.

To coalesce all these great knowledge sources, we’ve just created a new landing page with references to the video blogs and the related SAFe articles.  You can find that page in the Advanced Topics section of SAFe 5.0.

Stay SAFe,
—Harry and the Framework team