As Agile methodologies gain traction, scaling Agile practices across large enterprises becomes the next frontier. SAFe and LeSS are two frameworks that have emerged as popular options. While they both provide models for implementing Agile at scale, they differ significantly.
Understanding these two frameworks is key to success when adopting Agile. In this post, we will compare SAFe and LeSS, from their origins and principles to their structure, roles, and how they scale agile.
You will get to learn the pros and cons of each and when to use SAFe or LeSS based on team size, project complexity, and other factors. With clarity on these two approaches, you can determine the best fit to scale agile for your needs.
What is the Difference Between LeSS and SAFe?
Bottomline Upfront: LeSS is a minimalistic framework that scales Scrum principles with few additions, emphasizing self-organizing teams and adaptability. SAFe in contrast provides structured coordination for large enterprises, with multiple levels, roles, and processes for alignment across teams and business objectives.
SAFe vs LeSS: Origins and Evolution
SAFe was created by Dean Leffingwell, an experienced entrepreneur and methodologist who has extensively consulted organizations like Rational Software and Rally Software. SAFe had its initial release in 2011, with five major versions since. It continues to evolve based on industry trends.
In contrast, LeSS was co-founded by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde who are hands-on software developers with decades of expertise in large-scale product development.
Though LeSS was formally announced in 2015, its origins trace back years earlier through the three Large Scale Scrum books published in 2008, 2010, and 2016. LeSS encapsulates substantial real-world experience even before its official release as a framework.
An interesting difference is seen in how both frameworks market themselves. SAFe adopts a formal, almost engineering-like tone with structured diagrams on its website. This hints at its emphasis on processes and frameworks. LeSS uses informal, colorful drawings to explain its workings, highlighting simplicity.
In terms of evolution, SAFe has gone through multiple versions like 2.0, 4.0, 4.5, etc. This enables training and certification holders to keep current by revisiting courses.
LeSS does not have versions as it just provides two frameworks which are basic LeSS (for up to 8 teams) and LeSS Huge (for larger deployments).
What is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides a structured model for implementing Agile practices across large organizations with multiple teams. It is the most widely adopted framework for scaling Agile.
SAFe incorporates concepts from Agile methodologies like Scrum and Lean thinking approaches like Kanban, and is based on principles like delivering value rapidly through short iterations, engaging customers, and continuous improvement.
Some key components of SAFe include:
- Agile Release Trains (ARTs): These are groups of Agile teams that plan, develop, test, and release software together in sync. They align teams to a common mission on a fixed schedule called a Program Increment (PI).
- Program Increment (PI): This is a timeboxed period of typically 8-12 weeks during which an ART delivers incremental value in the form of working software. At the end of each PI, teams demo completed features.
- Levels: SAFe has four levels to scale Agile (Team, Program, Large Solution, and Portfolio), and provides roles, ceremonies, and guidelines tailored for each level.
- Roles: In addition to Scrum’s roles like Product Owner and Scrum Master, SAFe defines other roles like Release Train Engineer, Solution Architect, and System Architect who facilitate coordination.
- Configuration: SAFe is modular and can be customized by implementing only certain levels like Team and Program. Certain features can also be opted in or out as needed.
SAFe brings order and alignment to large scale Agile development by providing organisational structures and processes. It enables a top-down strategy deployment with business goals cascading down to drive team execution.
With components integrated across multiple levels, SAFe provides a synchronized cadence and coordination. This facilitates delivering large, complex solutions involving hundreds of people more efficiently.
What are the 4 Levels of SAFe?
SAFe scales Agile delivery through four levels – Team, Program, Large Solution, and Portfolio. Based on their size and complexity needs, organizations can implement one or more levels.
1. Team Level
The Team level focuses on the daily work of agile development teams. These cross-functional teams plan, develop, test, and deliver features in short iterations using Scrum, Kanban, or XP.
At the team level, SAFe simply integrates proven Agile engineering practices that empower teams to deliver continuously, and no major changes are needed to adopt this level.
2. Program Level
The Program level aligns multiple Agile teams to a shared business and technology mission.
It introduces the Agile Release Train (ART) which is a long-lived team of teams that work toward a common goal. ARTs deliver value in Program Increments (PIs) which are timeboxed periods of 8-12 weeks.
The program level also defines roles like Release Train Engineer, System Architect, and UX Designers to connect activities between teams.
3. Large Solution Level
The Large Solution level allows coordination between multiple ARTs that are building and delivering an integrated large solution.
This level manages dependencies, integrates components, and synchronizes activities across ARTs to provide a seamless end-to-end flow.
Solution Trains, Solution Architects, and other solution-wide roles facilitate the integration.
4. Portfolio Level
The Portfolio level connects the enterprise’s vision, strategies, and investment funding to the programs and teams executing the work.
It provides business agility by allowing continuous value realization through ongoing funding and governance aligned to the company’s objectives.
Lean portfolio management practices defined here help optimize investments to maximize benefits.
By scaling in stages using these levels, SAFe helps drive faster outcomes with higher predictability and quality even in large complex environments.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SAFe
The extensive and structured nature of SAFe provides certain benefits but also comes with some limitations that organizations should evaluate.
Advantages of SAFe
SAFe’s defined framework and multi-level alignment offer advantages like:
- Alignment to Business Goals: The ability to connect portfolio-level business objectives to program initiatives down to team execution through strategy mapping and backlog connectivity helps align teams to deliver outcomes that provide value.
- Coordination at Scale: The Agile Release Trains, along with the Program Increment cadence and roles like Release Train Engineer, provide synchronization that facilitates collaboration when large teams must coordinate to build and deliver integrated solutions.
- Gradual Adoption: Rather than having to transform entirely in one massive effort, the multi-level modular approach allows taking an incremental path to scale Agile practices across the organization in stages.
- Familiar Constructs: For organizations and leaders accustomed to traditional plan-driven approaches, the program and portfolio constructs and terminology in SAFe will feel familiar and can ease the transition towards adopting Agile.
- Visibility: At scale, the ability to plan features and initiatives through roadmaps and break them down into actionable Sprints or PIs, along with the events, metrics, and artifacts baked into the framework improves transparency in tracking progress.
Disadvantages of SAFe
However, some key downsides to weigh include:
- Complexity: The coordination needs stemming from the multi-layered organizational structures defined by the framework introduces complexity and overhead that could impede agility, especially for smaller organizations.
- Reduced Flexibility: The defined workflows, need for alignment, and top-down decision-making inherent in SAFe’s hierarchical approach allows teams less autonomy and flexibility compared to more decentralized Agile implementations.
- Role Proliferation: The addition of new roles prescribed by the framework like Release Train Engineer, Solution Architect, etc. can increase costs along with supervision and centralized control over teams, conflicting with the Agile philosophy of self-organizing teams.
- More Learning: Getting proficient in the elaborate framework requires a significant investment of time for training leaders, managers, and team members which may be challenging.
- Lack of Leadership Support: Given SAFe’s guidance touches all levels, persistent commitment from senior leadership down through middle management is imperative for successful adoption and lack of support can derail efforts.
What is Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) Framework?
The Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework extends the core Scrum process to multiple teams working together on one product.
While Scrum focuses on managing the work of one team, LeSS scales the same Scrum principles across larger product teams. It takes a “scaling by descaling” approach.
LeSS aims to remain as simple as possible by avoiding adding new roles or artifacts. Instead, it applies the same Scrum elements like the Sprint, Product Owner role, and Product Backlog across multiple teams.
There are two types of LeSS frameworks:
- LeSS: Supports up to 8 teams (of up to 9 people each) working on one product.
- LeSS Huge: Extends LeSS for several hundred people working together by structuring teams into Requirement Areas.
In LeSS, the full team is expanded to the LeSS Product Group which contains the cross-functional teams working on the large product.
By preserving Scrum principles at scale, LeSS provides agility for large product development while avoiding unnecessary complexity through new processes. The simplicity enables decentralization, flexibility, and leveraging direct communication between teams.
Advantages and Disadvantages of LeSS
Adopting LeSS offers certain advantages but also some limitations to evaluate.
Advantages of LeSS
Key advantages of using LeSS include:
- Simplicity: By sticking to pure Scrum elements without introducing additional roles or artifacts, LeSS avoids unnecessary complexity that could bog down agility when scaling up agile practices across multiple teams working on one product.
- Decentralization: With its focus on self-management where feature teams have autonomy to determine how to solve problems and build solutions with minimal overhead, LeSS facilitates decentralized decision-making and flexibility.
- Customer-centric: Since LeSS feature teams are cross-functional and there is less role specialization, they can interact directly with end-users and customers to build the right product that delivers value.
- Lean: The LeSS principles optimize the framework to reduce waste, enable rapid learning, and get continuous customer feedback by having teams focus on shippable features prioritized based on customer needs.
- Adaptability: With its minimal rules that allow teams flexibility to inspect and adapt their organizational structures as required through experimentation, LeSS allows for evolutionary improvements.
Disadvantages of LeSS
Potential limitations to consider include:
- Lack of Guidance: For those seeking more structure and specifics versus empowered teams, LeSS leaves many adoption details to be worked out by teams which can seem like inadequate guidance.
- Team Skillset Gaps: The feature team emphasis means teams missing certain skills will need to rely on support from the Undone Department until they can develop those skills, which takes time.
- No Program Structure: Unlike SAFe, LeSS does not prescribe program levels for coordination between multiple product efforts, which some organizations may require.
- Experience Required: For organizations completely new to Agile, adopting LeSS directly can be overwhelming, given its assumption of basic Scrum fluency. Therefore, it works best for groups with some Agile experience.
- Cultural Shift: Transitioning from specialized component teams to cross-functional feature teams demands a mindset shift, and the benefits will take time and commitment to realize.
SAFe vs LeSS: 5 Key Differences
While SAFe and LeSS both aim to scale Agile practices across organizations, they take very divergent approaches as illustrated by these 5 fundamental differences:
1. Prescriptive vs Empirical Process
SAFe provides a comprehensive, detailed prescriptive framework incorporating multi-layered organizational structures, defined roles, cadenced events, metrics, and artifacts to impose order and align large teams.
The framework seeks to reduce chaos by providing specific guidance and processes for organizations to systematically scale.
In contrast, LeSS adopts an empirical process where only minimal guidance is provided through a few simple rules and principles.
LeSS emphasizes that teams must self-organize and find their way based on inspecting their workflow and adapting as needed. The focus is on continuous, evolutionary improvement rather than following predefined processes.
2. Top-down vs Bottom-up
SAFe has a strategic top-down orientation that is well-suited for alignment with business goals and strategy deployment. Initiatives defined by senior leaders flow down through middle management before cascading to teams for execution.
LeSS on the other hand places emphasis on bottom-up intelligence where the people and teams doing the work drive progress through decentralization. Rather than predefined strategic planning, strategy emerges incrementally through regular inspection, adaptation, and learning cycles.
3. Specialization vs Cross-functionality
SAFe incorporates specialized component teams like architects focused on specific technical concerns and divides up responsibility along those boundaries between teams.
In contrast, LeSS leverages cross-functional feature teams where each team has all the skills to deliver end-to-end from idea to production without hand-offs. The emphasis is on shared and collective responsibility.
4. Complexity vs Simplicity
SAFe introduces extra complexity into the organizational system by adding more roles, levels, cadences, coordination processes, and integration of various tools to impose control from the top.
LeSS on the other hand aims for organizational simplicity by sticking to only the few core Scrum roles and artifacts needed to get the job done. Avoiding unnecessary complexity and overhead better enables agility at scale.
5. Alignment vs Autonomy
SAFe has a strong focus on alignment, synchronization, standardization, and centralized decision-making to enable coordination between large numbers of teams and people.
In contrast, LeSS emphasizes decentralized authority, flexibility, and teams self-managing and self-organizing where teams direct themselves to determine how best to achieve outcomes.
SAFe vs LeSS Similarities
Despite the aforementioned different approaches, SAFe and LeSS share foundational building blocks that underpin their frameworks for scaling Agile.
1. Iterative Development
Both SAFe and LeSS adopt an iterative, incremental approach to product development through fixed-length iterations. SAFe uses Program Increments while LeSS relies on Sprints.
2. Cross-functional Teams
In both frameworks, Agile teams are organized as cross-functional groups that contain the varied skills to deliver product increments. They include developers, testers, designers, etc.
3. Planning in Iterations
The teams in SAFe and LeSS plan and commit to working software/functionality delivered over each iteration through practices like Sprint Planning.
4. Focus on Shippable Increments
There is an emphasis on building end-to-end potentially releasable product increments in each iteration across both frameworks.
5. Product Owner Role
Product Owners play a key role in both SAFe and LeSS to maintain and prioritize the Product Backlog as the source of development work.
6. Inspection and Transparency
Both rely on Agile practices like retrospectives, information radiators, and shared metrics to drive transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
SAFe vs LeSS: Which Framework to Use
Selecting between SAFe or LeSS involves evaluating organizational structure, culture, objectives, and other contextual factors. Below we explore typical scenarios where each framework is preferable.
When to Choose SAFe
SAFe tends to work well in situations where:
1. Coordinating Large, Complex Products
SAFe is well-suited when building large, intricate systems requiring coordination between many teams and integrating work from multiple products into a unified solution. SAFe provides the program structure and cadence to align cross-team efforts.
2. Connecting Strategy with Execution
For organizations that need structured governance with direct traceability from portfolio investments and strategic initiatives down to team execution, SAFe enables this linkage through its portfolio, program, and team levels.
3. Transitioning from Waterfall
In organizations accustomed to traditional plan-driven processes, SAFe can serve as an incremental pathway to adopting agile without completely disrupting long-established processes all at once.
4. Managing Intricate Dependencies
When product development involves complex dependencies between platforms, technical components, and shared services, SAFe provides coordination mechanisms through its team, program, and architectural roles and technical syncs.
5. Synchronizing Distributed Teams
For globally distributed teams that need to integrate their work into a unified development cadence, SAFe’s structured events, synchronization points, and timeboxed iterations facilitate coordination.
When to Choose LeSS
LeSS tends to be preferable in cases where:
1. Empowering Team-driven Organizations
LeSS is advantageous when the organization aims to transform into a decentralized structure with distributed control across empowered teams for rapid response and decision-making.
2. Leveraging Skilled, Self-sufficient Teams
In organizations where developers have broad technical expertise to take on end-to-end product responsibility, LeSS provides the flexibility for skilled teams to self-manage and determine solutions.
3. Evolving Strategy Bottom-up
For organizations that prefer strategy to emerge through ongoing learning and inspect-adapt cycles rather than predefined strategic planning, LeSS facilitates this bottom-up evolutionary approach.
4. Coordination with Loose Coupling
When product development has few dependencies enabling loosely coupled architecture, LeSS offers a lightweight coordination model scaling pure Scrum principles across products.
5. Seeking Agility through Simplicity
When the priority is reducing process overhead through simplicity for flexibility over extensive coordination, LeSS provides that agility by avoiding inherent complexity.
The appropriate choice ultimately depends on the current organizational design, team capabilities, priorities, and desired evolution.
SAFe vs LeSS: Certification Programs
SAFe and LeSS take different approaches to certifications for framework training:
SAFe Certifications
SAFe offers various role-based certifications like SAFe Agilist, SAFe Product Owner/Manager, SAFe DevOps Practitioner, etc. at four competency levels – Foundational, Practitioner, Advanced, and SPCT.
These comprehensive certifications require attending multi-day in-person or online training, an exam, and maintaining annual renewal through Continuing Education Units. The structured programs enable individuals to get certified across SAFe practices.
LeSS Certifications
LeSS does not offer any formal certifications. The creators encourage organizations to focus simply on applying Scrum well at scale.
Rather than certifications, LeSS offers optional paid courses targeted at executives, managers, and coaches. But taking courses is not required – online guides provide the LeSS rules free of cost.
This aligns with LeSS philosophy of avoiding unnecessary complexity and highlighting that learning happens through experience practicing LeSS. There is no certification industry around LeSS.
Organizations should evaluate whether having formal SAFe certifications or informal LeSS coaching better matches their team’s learning needs when scaling Agile.
Final Thoughts on SAFe vs LeSS
When scaling Agile across large enterprises, SAFe and LeSS offer two proven yet divergent approaches. Choosing between these frameworks requires evaluating your organizational structure, team capabilities, culture, and objectives.
SAFe brings coordination through a structured model but risks overwhelming complexity. LeSS provides simplicity by sticking to Scrum, yet expects disciplined self-organization.
Beyond weighing the different certification options, understand that adopting a scaled framework is not a single event but an ongoing journey of inspecting and adapting.
Carefully consider your context to determine if SAFe’s alignment or LeSS’ autonomy better empowers your teams to deliver value at scale.
