“The Rollout” (Book): A novel about SAFe mindset

“The Rollout” by Alex Yakyma is a novel about Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) mindset. The author decided to write a novel to make us “fully immersing” in the subject, becoming part of it as we are imagining the situation that we are reading, and, therefore, our brain will learn of it as it gained this knowledge through an actual experience. It is a kind of business novel.

Being composed of 14 chapters, each of them ending with “Ethan’s diary” in which a set of bullet points summarize the SAFe method and implementation strategy used on VeraComm, a software engineering company that is the main stage of this novel.

The chapters are:

1- Catching the Firebird;

2- A Beautiful Mindset;

3- Inspect, Adapt, Live!;

4- Learning the Way;

5-The Prep;

6-The Launch;

7-Fun with Planning;

8-On Doughnuts and Commitment;

9-The Pitfalls of Execution;

10-One Shot;

11-The Way Out;

12-Following Pathways of Value;

13-The Overflow;

14-Giving Back.

After explaining what is SAFe as a framework and presenting the foundational principles of it as Agile for large software enterprises (between 50 and 125 persons), it is possible to notice a great investment of Yakyma on the importance of PI Planning (to understand the bigger picture view) and collaboration between management and teams. Incremental development, continuous improvement and iteration distributed through 6 sprints (with the duration of two weeks) is another characteristic underlined, as well as having working software as a true measure of progress to present on System Demos (which occur every two weeks), seen as a moment to strength trust between teams and business owners (“the key stakeholders of a train. The people that essentially decide its overall course of action and provide feedback on value delivered”).

Yakyma also dedicated some pages in his “Rollout” novel to the story points and business value, to the various feature ‘s status, to the meaning of confidence vote and to the main questions to be done during a retrospective (“what went well”, “what didn’t” and “what we would do differently next time”).