Steve Doubleday on "Why SAFe Isn't: Three Frames of Software Development"

I attended my first couple SoCTAgile meetups in early 2020 and had been looking forward to more. Then the world changed. Before everything went sideways and virtual, Gary Scharf organized many valuable sessions for us. Let's take a moment to appreciate him. With your help, I hope I can live up to Gary's example. And with that...

Welcome back to the Southern Connecticut Agile Meetup!

Our October presenter will be Steve Doubleday, software guy and Ph.D, Mathematical Behavioral Sciences.

>>> About the speaker

Steve Doubleday has spent a long career in software operations and development, mostly in health care. For twenty years he has been a champion of agile methods within his organization, starting with Extreme Programming. Observing the uneven results, he concluded that neither executives nor consulting firms had a useful understanding of the underlying problems. In 2012, he left work for five years to begin a doctoral program to understand why large organizations have so many problems building large systems. Back at work, he finally finished his dissertation in 2020, and is eager to explain what he's learned about the relevant science.

>>> About the presentation

The uneven adoption of agile methods over the past couple of decades can be usefully understood as coming from a difficulty executives have in letting go of three frames -- the Building, Project, and More frames, and accompanying metaphors. These are ubiquitous in the culture of many large IT organizations, and they conflict with what agile enthusiasts think are better ways of building software. In these terms, SAFe has been successful because it blends agile concepts with the Building, Project, and More frames, allowing older and newer ways of thinking to co-exist. This uneasy coexistence can be thought of as an importance source of problems in SAFe efforts. In turn, this suggests that useful paths forward may need new frames and metaphors.