The danger of spreading hatred toward a Framework
I am dismayed. I never thought I would ever have to write an article of this nature. I had thought that the agile community’s purpose is to help organisations: become more agile and to move from their current state to a better state of agility — in the best possible way. However, over the past few weeks, I have seen lots of hatred towards SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) on LinkedIn and Twitter.
This hatred is unprofessional, ugly and childish. It’s like school children fighting over whether Marvel comic books are better than DC comic books (DC is obviously better! And, yes, I know they are known as graphic novels these days).
Just saying SAFe is not agile in itself is not a discussion point. I want to see healthy and respectful disagreements where people can learn from each other.
I worked in a SAFe environment for a year, and I experienced its benefits. I can clearly see SAFe’s place in our industry, having been involved in a successful implementation of SAFe. The organisation I was at had huge challenges and SAFe helped to resolve them (this will be covered in a future blog post).
I am agnostic when it comes to agility. I am neither a huge fan of SAFe nor am I vehemently against it. I will say the same about other Agile frameworks and methods — including the most popular one.
Sadly, it is now fashionable to bash SAFe. In doing so, SAFe is becoming even more popular. Yes, SAFe is officially the number one agile scaling framework for large enterprises, see the 11th Version One State of Agile Survey.
What concerns me most of all is the people who are spreading hate, they are:
- People who have never used SAFe
- People who have not read or watched any SAFe materials
- People who do not know anything about it and like to comment on the topic
- People who have a vested interest in promoting another scaling framework that most companies do not use
- Click bait folks who need more social media followers to sell their training courses
Still spreading hatred? Try doing something useful for the agile community instead, have a healthy discussion on why you believe SAFe is not Agile.
