The report covers the different kinds of aspects of the most effective methodologies that are used such as Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Scaled Agile Framework or SAFE and Scrum. All these methodologies are used by many business organisations in the United States for conducting researches in an effective manner, and here in this report, all these three methodologies have been compared regarding the various domains within which the methodologies have been managed. The comparison is between the methodologies in different domains including roles, processes, artifacts, benefits, complexity, usage and tools among which five different roles have been focused on for the three methods (Ambler & Lines, 2012). After comparing all these three methods, lastly, a brief description will also be provided about which methodology has been the most effective and how it has managed to bring good outcomes for the accounting firm in the United States. The accounting firm named Deloitte has been considered as the case study, and it is a large multinational professional services company with its major operations and processes managed in its headquarters in the United States (Ambler & Lines, 2012).
Disciplined Agile Delivery, also referred to as DAD is a hybrid approach which enables learning of individuals and focuses on the needs and requirements of the people first to sustain in the market place with ease and effectiveness. This methodology is an effective way of managing IT solutions delivery and consists of a risk value delivery cycle to focus on goals and objectives and remain scalable all throughout. Deloitte has managed its disciplined agile approach by considering the Scrum for developing a useful strategy to lead the software teams in the right direction and allow them to achieve the goals and objectives with ease and efficiency (Ambler & Lines, 2013).
The Scaled Agile Framework or SAFE is used by business organisations to identify the major issues and challenges faced during the development and delivery of systems and software within quick time. The Scaled agile framework is an effective online platform that allows knowledge acquisition and creates proper success patterns for the implementation of Lean agile software at the enterprise scale (Astromskis et al., 2013). The major components required for configuring the SAFE are essential SAFE, large solution SAFE, portfolio SAFE and full SAFE.
Scrum is considered as an effective and reliable agile framework that manages the complex projects with ease. It was developed for management and delivery of software development project and provide innovative scopes of work to ensure that the end products are properly handed over to the customers (Brenner & Wunder, 2015).
Roles
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Disciplined Agile Delivery |
Scaled Agile Framework |
Scrum |
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Roles |
Roles |
Roles |
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Disciplined Agile Delivery manages extension of Scrum by utilising Agile modelling, Extreme programming, Unified processes and various other methods. The primary roles of Discipline Agile Delivery include the activities by team lead, owners of products, team members and individual who manage architecture to fulfill the requirements and preferences of stakeholders (Brown, Ambler & Royce, 2013). Specialist, individual tester, individual who possess relevant expertise of the domain, technical expert as well as an integrator, manages the secondary roles. The secondary roles help in gaining ideas about the products, operations and various iterations all throughout the lifecycle for delivery of products (Leffingwell, 2016). As the methodology acts as a free framework, so it supports several delivery life cycles to addressing the end to end delivery life cycle as well as implement proper governance strategies that were found missing from XP and Scrum. |
The roles of Scaled Agile Framework are to improve the outcomes of system development by aligning the organisation towards the major business and technical goals and objectives. This would furthermore help in improving the economic outcomes by making proper decisions in business (deloitte.com, 2017). The roles also include organising teams to deliver value as well as prevent bureaucracy inherent within a traditional and hierarchical structure. The Scaled Agile Framework also develops a good environment for organisations to enable collaboration, promote innovation procedures and make necessary improvements to derive positive outcomes. The essential SAFE helps in providing a starting point to address the most critical components and furthermore define, develop and test various aspects from the backlog within a wide range of iterations (Larman & Vodde, 2013). The large solution SAFE allows the Agile trainers and suppliers to contribute largely and prepare a good organisational construct too. The budgeting and governance procedures are major roles which can help the company to ensure that good amounts of return are achieved based on the investments made to accomplish the desired strategic objectives (Leffingwell et al., 2013). |
The roles are managed by the product owner, scrum master and scrum team. The product owners gain the responsibility to manage their products properly while the master of scrum can act as leaders within the teams, who manage the sustainable development practices. The product owner communicates the vision and priorities of a particular venture to the development teams. The scrum master has the roles of reducing chances of impediments, which can hinder the successful accomplishment of organisational goals and objectives (Eklund, Olsson & Strøm, 2014). The scrum master also discusses with product owner about ways of enhancing the rate of return on investments. The roles of teams include software architecture development, testing, designing the user interface, etc (Laanti, 2014). |
Processes
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Disciplined Agile Delivery |
Scaled Agile Framework |
Scrum |
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Processes |
Processes |
Processes |
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This kind of methodology can fill in the process gaps as well as fulfill the needs and requirements of stakeholders. It also addresses the entire life cycle for delivery and initiation of the project. DAD manages various technical methods too such as Extreme Programming and prepares documentation, modelling and development of strategies related to corporate governance too (Lines & Ambler, 2012). |
SAFE also allows for aligning the organisational goals and objectives, enable collaboration and deliver skillful and knowledgeable teams, which can make the company adapt to the needs and requirements of the business. To develop an extensive platform for enhancing the learning and knowledge acquisition approaches, the SAFE methodology describes the roles, responsibilities, artifacts, processes, benefits, usage that are needed to implement the Lean Agile development appropriately (Nguyen et al., 2013). The system development outcomes have improved as the SAFE methodology has aligned the enterprise towards the technical and business objectives and even delivered normal schedule for letting the business plan be executed properly and quality of solutions get enhanced. This promotes continuous learning and prevents delays by maintaining a good hierarchical structure (Poort, 2014). |
Scrum methodology enables agile processes which can help to gain alternatives for managing a traditional project with ease and effectiveness. The agile processes can also allow the team members to respond to issues easily with the help of incremental, iterative and obtaining the empirical feedbacks (Papadopoulos, 2015). These kinds of processes can deliver alternative ways of achieving good outcomes as the waterfall or traditional sequential development models. |
Artifacts
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Disciplined Agile Delivery |
Scaled Agile Framework |
Scrum |
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Artifacts |
Artifacts |
Artifacts |
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The artifacts found at the agile team level include team backlog, team PSI objectives, Sprint goals, working software, spikes, metrics, etc. |
The artifacts of Scaled Agile Framework are present within the spanning palette and can be applied to the various teams, programs and portfolios for delivering the best solutions with much ease and convenience. The artifacts are metrics, shared devices, CoP, milestones, roadmap, vision, system team, etc (Stettina & Hörz, 2015). The metrics are the primary ways of measuring the working solutions by defining some intermediates and furthermore use portfolios to measure progress. The CoP or community of practice is a group consisting of team members who can act according to the organisation’s mission for sharing knowledge and information in various domains (Ambler & Lines, 2012). The system team is another artifact, which guides the development team to utilise the Agile development area properly and ensure integration, testing automation procedure and delivery process in a consistent manner. Other artifacts include product roadmap, team backlog, metrics, etc. |
The most essential artifacts of scrum are product backlog, sprint backlog and product increment. The product backlog combines all the requirements of baseline to manage availability by the product owner to re scrum team. The owner of the product is found responsible for managing the validity and content of the artifacts. The sprint backlog is a component of the product backlog that enables the team to work faster and manage proper testing, documentation and integration in an effective manner too (Ambler & Lines, 2012). The product increment is the most important scrum artifact that enables the development team to produce products that can be shipped. The owners must align the product increment artifact with the goals of the development team so that the products are acceptable (Ambler & Lines, 2013). |
Benefits
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Disciplined Agile Delivery |
Scaled Agile Framework |
Scrum |
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Benefits |
Benefits |
Benefits |
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DAD is a hybrid framework, and it is proved that it follows lean and agile approaches. The different phases of DAD follow milestones to focus on large-scale agile delivery in an effective way. The advantages also include strong technical architecture and focus on the concepts of engineering and furthermore ensure clarify the governance mechanisms to proper management of products and services delivery (Astromskis et al., 2013). |
The artifacts of scaled agile framework consist of epic owners, enterprise architect, business owners, etc. The artifacts of SAFE are essential SAFE, Large solution SAFE, Portfolio SAFE and Full SAFE. The essential SAFE is the basic artifact that acts as a configuration tool as well by proving a start point to implement the methodology. It also describes most of the important components for understanding the benefits of the framework with ease and effectiveness (Brenner & Wunder, 2015). The large solution SAFE is another artifact that develops large and complex solutions to contribute to the Agile training members and suppliers. It also manages large sized and complex IT systems to develop independent systems. The portfolio SAFE delivers a strategy and manages the investment funding for the people and resources. This also promotes lean governance along with guiding the members to develop programs to enhance the efficiency of portfolio execution (Brown, Ambler & Royce, 2013). It also enhances the ability to manage the proper flow of value streams and ensure proper budgeting procedures and governance techniques. The full SAFE helps in supporting the large and integrated solutions too. |
The sprint backlog artifact helps the development team to perform to the potential at a faster rate to deliver shippable products and services. The alignment of product increment with the development team goals has further enhanced the quality of services and managed proper hierarchical structure (deloitte.com, 2017). A scrum develops better features in sprints incrementally that allows the products to be available much earlier in the development cycle. The scrum helps in maintaining the good quality and enables transparency by involving the stakeholders and engaging the product owners too. It is also easier to identify risks and respond to those at the earlier stages of the development life cycle (Laanti, 2014). |
Tools
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Disciplined Agile Delivery |
Scaled Agile Framework |
Scrum |
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Tools |
Tools |
Tools |
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The process oriented tools that can support the DAD are Microsoft TFS, Blueprint, Enterprise Transformation Advisor, IBM Rational method composer or RMC. The Enterprise Transformation Advisor supports transitioning the modern practices within the organisation to the enterprise scale and enhance the innovative abilities to inspect, adapt and value the streams of governance in an effective way (Larman & Vodde, 2013). |
Essential tools for managing SAFE include Kanban, Backlog, Lean UX, Agilefant, Roadmaps and PI objectives. |
The most important tools used by Agile teams for scrum project management are user stories, scrum boards, sprint backlogs, burn down charts and velocity charts (Leffingwell, 2016). |
The business organisation chosen here as the case study is Deloitte and it has its headquarters in the United States. The company is specialised in audit, consulting, advisory, tax related services, and thus is considered as one of the major accounting firms within the financial accounting and management industry. Based on the analysis and comparison of various tools, benefits, processes, artifacts and roles, the scrum is the most suitable agile project management framework that could be used by Delloite to sustain in the business environment and ensure proper development, management and delivery of services to people for fulfilling their needs and requirements with ease and effectiveness (Leffingwell, 2016). The agile framework not only effectively manages the project but also helps in controlling the iterative and incremental projects of different types, thereby allowing to enhance the popularity and efficiency of the agile software development process too.
This agile framework is simple and easy to understand and work with, because of which, it has delivered more productivity and has even been considered effective for various engineering practices that have been promoted by agile methodologies (Leffingwell et al., 2013). The product owner can consistently interact with the team to discuss the various processes, features and non-fundamental requirements of the system for delivering a proper and finished product or software system. The priorities have been driven by the owner of the product, and this has allowed the cross functional teams working within Deloitte to make prior estimations and deliver increments that are shippable at successive sprints for a particular time period (Lines & Ambler, 2012).
After committing to a sprint product backlog, there are no chances of adding some other functionalities to the sprint by anyone else other than the team. After the delivery of sprint is commenced, the backlog of the product is analysed and prioritised for the second time in case it is necessary for selecting the next functional activity for the next sprint that will be used afterwards (Nguyen et al., 2013). Deloitte has also preferred the scrum methodology here for scaling to the multiple teams across the organisation, which also enhances the efficiency of supporting the sprint planning through easier approaches of managing the backlog of products and services too.
Conclusion
The topic revolved around the various concepts of an agile framework for project management considering the various methodologies named Disciplined Agile Delivery or DAD, Scaled Agile Framework or SAFE and Agile Scrum Methodology. All these three methodologies have been compared with each other based on the domains of roles, processes, artifacts, benefits, and tools. The comparison showed how these methodologies had played a major role in managing the development of the project in an effective manner. With the consideration of the accounting firm named Deloitte, the most important and effective methodology had been selected, which could benefit the company as a whole. The Agile Scrum framework was considered as effective for management of successful business operations and could help the company to sustain in the business environment as well.
References
Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. (2012). Disciplined agile delivery.
Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. (2012). Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Pracfifioner’s Guide to Agile Software Development in the Enterprise.
Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. (2013). Going Beyond Scrum: Disciplined Agile Delivery. Disciplined Agile Consortium. White Paper Series, 1-16.
Astromskis, S., Janes, A., Sillitti, A., & Succi, G. (2013). Supporting governance in disciplined agile delivery using non-invasive measurement and process mining.
Brenner, R., & Wunder, S. (2015, April). Scaled Agile Framework: Presentation and real world example. In Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), 2015 IEEE Eighth International Conference on (pp. 1-2). IEEE.
Brown, A. W., Ambler, S., & Royce, W. (2013, May). Agility at scale: economic governance, measured improvement, and disciplined delivery. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering(pp. 873-881). IEEE Press.
deloitte.com. (2017). Deloitte UK | Audit, Consulting, Financial Advisory and Tax services. [online] Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com [Accessed 17 Aug. 2017].
Eklund, U., Olsson, H. H., & Strøm, N. J. (2014, May). Industrial challenges of scaling agile in mass-produced embedded systems. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 30-42). Springer, Cham.
Laanti, M. (2014, May). Characteristics and principles of scaled agile. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 9-20). Springer, Cham.
Larman, C., & Vodde, B. (2013). Scaling agile development. CrossTalk, 9, 8-12.
Leffingwell, D. (2016). SAFe® 4.0 Reference Guide: Scaled Agile Framework® for Lean Software and Systems Engineering. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Leffingwell, D., Yakyma, A., Jemilo, D., & Knaster, R. (2013). Scaled agile framework. Siehe: https://scaledagileframework. com.
Lines, M., & Ambler, S. (2012). Disciplined Agile Delivery.
Nguyen, H., Shen, Z., Gu, X., Subbiah, S., & Wilkes, J. (2013, June). AGILE: Elastic Distributed Resource Scaling for Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In ICAC(Vol. 13, pp. 69-82).
Papadopoulos, G. (2015). Moving from Traditional to Agile Software Development Methodologies Also on Large, Distributed Projects. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 175, 455-463.
Poort, E. R. (2014). Driving agile architecting with cost and risk. IEEE Software, 31(5), 20-23.
Stettina, C. J., & Hörz, J. (2015). Agile portfolio management: An empirical perspective on the practice in use. International Journal of Project Management, 33(1), 140-152
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