Team and Technical Agility

The Team and Technical Agility Discipline describes how to enable cross-functional Agile Teams to accelerate value delivery. It describes the critical skills, roles, and practices that high-performing Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) use to create high-quality products and solutions for customers. All Agile Teams and ARTs are responsible for building quality into everything they deliver. The result of applying this discipline across all of product development, engineering, and delivery is an organization with the team and technical agility required to deliver continuous value at scale

Figure 1 shows the elements, processes, and outcomes of the Team and Technical Agility described within this discipline of SAFe. Click on the icons to learn more.

Figure 1. The elements, processes, and outcomes of the Team and Technical Agility described within this discipline of SAFe.

The Agile Release Train (ART)

When a product or solution is too large for a single Agile Team to deliver, an Agile Release Train (ART) effectively creates alignment across multiple teams and a common way of working, as shown in Figure 1. This approach helps Agile Teams work together more smoothly and ensures that the value they are developing is ready for use at the same time. Agile Teams can deliver value to the market more efficiently and with better quality, surpassing what the enterprise could do with a less organized approach. ARTs are generally made up of 50 -125 people. They are cross-functional and have all the capabilities needed to define, build, validate, release, and, where applicable, operate one or more products or solutions.

ARTs include the following key roles:

• Product Management – responsible for defining and supporting the building of desirable, feasible, viable, and sustainable products that meet customer needs over the product-market lifecycle.
• System Architect – an individual or small cross-discipline team that defines the overall architecture of the system, helps identify Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs), determines the significant elements and subsystems, and helps design the interfaces and collaborations among them.
• Release Train Engineer (RTE) – a servant leader and the chief Scrum Master/Team Coach for the train. The RTE facilitates optimizing the flow of value by ensuring the ART events and artifacts function correctly, including the ART Kanban, Inspect & Adapt (I&A) workshop, ART Sync, and PI Planning.
• Business Owners – a small group of stakeholders with the business and technical responsibility for fitness for use, governance, and return on investment (ROI) for a product or solution developed by an ART. They are primary stakeholders in the ART and actively participate in ART events.

ART Events

The heartbeat of the ART is the Planning Intervals (PIs), which represent fixed timeboxes during which the Agile Release Train delivers continuous value to its customers. The PI starts with PI Planning, a critical cadence-based event that brings all teams on the ART together to align to a shared mission and create a plan for delivering a set of committed PI Objectives.

Throughout the PI, System Demos showcase an integrated view of new features from each iteration, allowing ART stakeholders to assess progress. The Inspect & Adapt (I&A) event at the end of the PI enables teams to evaluate the current solution, reflect on their processes, and identify areas for improvement through a structured problem-solving workshop. Additionally, regular ART Sync, Coach Sync, and PO Sync events streamline communication and coordination across the ART. Additionally, the Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration allows teams time for exploration, innovation, and dedicated planning. This time can be used for both informal and formal learning opportunities, fostering a culture of continuous growth and improvement.

Agile Teams

Agile Teams are cross-functional groups of ten or fewer individuals who can define, build, test, and deploy an increment of value in a short time box. To facilitate their work, most SAFe teams adopt SAFe Scrum, a lightweight process designed for Agile Teams to deliver value continuously. Likewise, SAFe Team Kanban—also a Lean-Agile method—helps teams visualize their workflows, establish work-in-process (WIP) limits, and measure throughput. Both approaches emphasize the importance of delivering value continuously while encouraging ongoing process improvement.

Each Agile Team includes the following roles:

• Scrum Master/Team Coach (SM/TC) – a servant leader and Agile Team coach who helps the team remove impediments, facilitates team events and fosters an environment for high-performing teams.

• Product Owner (PO) – the content authority for the team backlog is responsible for defining stories and prioritizing the backlog.

Technical Agility Practices

The ART builds or shares a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP), allowing Agile Teams to deliver new functionality to users as needed. In some instances, ‘continuous’ may mean daily or even multiple releases per day. In others, this may mean weekly or monthly releases to satisfy market demands and business goals. To support this continuous delivery of value, the ART builds out an architectural runway consisting of the existing code, components, and technical infrastructure needed to implement near-term features with minimal redesign and delay.

To further enhance collaboration and efficiency, a DevOps mindset promotes a culture of communication, integration, and automation among all stakeholders involved in planning, developing, testing, deploying, releasing, and maintaining a system. Additionally, built-in quality is a critical element of scaling agility across multiple teams. This approach describes a set of practices applied to ensure that Agile Teams’ outputs consistently meet appropriate quality standards throughout the entire process of creating customer value.

Competencies of the Team and Technical Agility Discipline

Each competency below describes a set of knowledge, skills, and techniques required to achieve mastery in a team and technical agility area. They provide the necessary information, learning resources, and practical application guidance needed to support success. Together, the competencies represent current SAFe guidance for this discipline. However, over time, as new ways of working emerge, the competencies themselves will evolve.

Selecting the competencies to focus on at a particular time will depend on organizational context, individual experience and knowledge, and the current opportunities or gaps of each product. Click on the competency below that you wish to explore.

NOTE: To accelerate value delivery, the competencies of each SAFe discipline will be released in small batches. All those accessible as a ‘blue box’ are currently available, with the remaining ‘greyed out’ competencies to be released incrementally.

Assessing the Team and Technical Agility Discipline

The Team and Technical Agility assessment enables members of Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains to assess how well they are achieving agility behaviors and practices. The results can help guide the organization on its journey through the competencies when used to highlight which areas may need the most focus at any given time.

The Measure and Grow article offers guidance on facilitating the SAFe assessments, as well as best practices for collecting and interpreting data. The Lean Portfolio Management assessment is available as either a downloadable spreadsheet or online through SAFe Studio, via our partner Comparative Agility.

The Comparative Agility platform, which includes integrated SAFe CoPilot functionality, offers additional data collection, AI-driven analysis, comparison, and trending capabilities to enhance your results. Access the online assessment from the Measure and Grow SAFe Studio page or from this link directly.

Team and Technical Agility Overview

Building Great Products with Agile Teams and ARTs

The Agile Team is the basic building block of Team and Technical Agility. Strong technical expertise within learning-focused individuals is the foundation of each Agile Team. An Agile Team’s primary objective is to build and deliver great products and solutions. An Agile Team iteratively defines, builds, tests, and delivers value to its customers. These teams have the authority and accountability to manage their work, which increases productivity and accelerates time-to-market.

Agile Teams have two specialty roles. The Product Owner ensures that the Team Backlog is aligned with customer needs and guides the team toward delivering maximum business value. The Scrum Master/Team Coach is a servant leader and coach for the team, facilitating the agreed-to Agile process and fostering an environment that enables fast flow.

Value delivery often spans traditional organizational boundaries. Therefore, Agile Teams are multidisciplinary, containing all the people and skills needed to deliver value across functional domains. Team members are dedicated full-time to the team, which creates a shared purpose and enhances flow.

However, at scale, no one team can build and deliver large systems within a reasonable timeframe. Complex systems require a broad range of specialized skills that cannot be contained within a single team. Therefore, multiple Agile Teams collaborate as members of an Agile Release Train (ART). They operate across functions to deliver one or more products or solutions, as shown in Figure 2.

Agile Release Trains (ARTs) are organized around one or more value streams, aligning teams to a shared business and technology mission. Just like a single team, their purpose is to deliver valuable products and solutions to customers, which requires a diverse range of skills. The ways of working within an ART resemble those of an Agile Team, applied at scale across the value stream to provide integrated solutions that deliver significant business value. Like Agile Teams, ARTs plan together, commit together, execute together, and improve together.

Each Agile Team adopts SAFe Scrum, SAFe Team Kanban, or a hybrid method to regulate their synchronization and delivery cadence. They apply the chosen method to manage a shared backlog, deliver incrementally, build the architectural runway, and obtain frequent customer and stakeholder feedback. Scrum Masters/Team Coaches require deep competence in multiple methods of practice. They will be the primary coach for each team and need to be able to help team members identify the right blend of practices for them. 

Agile teams using SAFe Scrum, as shown in Figure 3, have a regular schedule of events to achieve shared goals and deliver value to the organization and its customers. They can plan, execute, and manage their work independently and adapt to changes as needed.

While most teams use SAFe Scrum, some face unpredictable workloads and changing priorities, which can lessen the effectiveness of iteration planning. In these situations, they often choose to use SAFe Team Kanban instead. While Kanban guides managing work in a flow-based system, it is not explicit concerning the roles, responsibilities, and events that teams use to apply Kanban as their Agile practice.

Kanban enhances visibility and workflow, leading to its adoption throughout organizations. Many organizations now use Kanban to implement Lean-Agile principles across various departments, including marketing, finance, HR, legal, security, compliance, operations, and Agile teams.

Modernizing Software and Hardware Engineering

While the application of Lean and Agile to both software and hardware engineering has the goal of interactive development and incremental delivery, each domain differs significantly due to the inherent nature of their outputs, as outlined below:

• Tangibility: Software is intangible and easily modified and updated. Hardware is physical, requiring manufacturing processes and retooling for changes, making iterations more costly and time-consuming.  
• Development cycles: Software development cycles are generally shorter, allowing for rapid iterations and responses to feedback. Hardware development involves longer cycles due to design, prototyping, testing, and manufacturing complexities.  
• Flexibility: Software allows for changes at any stage, while hardware requires more upfront design due to the challenges of modifying physical attributes. This impacts how agile principles like “responding to change” are applied.  
• Testing: Software testing can be more easily automated and repeated. Hardware testing often involves physical prototypes and real-world conditions, making it more complex and expensive.  
• Cost of Change: Software changes are relatively inexpensive, while changes in hardware can involve significant costs for retooling, material waste, and production delays.  

These differences require adaptations in how Agile principles are applied. While software engineering emphasizes rapid iterations and frequent releases, hardware engineering often requires longer iterations, more upfront planning, and a focus on minimizing costly physical modifications. Both of these topics are explored in more detail below.

Agile Software Development

Organizations decide to embrace Lean-Agile development either because their existing processes aren’t producing the desired results or because they anticipate that they won’t work in the future. By choosing an Agile development approach, they are adopting a model built around continuous improvement. Modern software engineering practices are constantly evolving, making it essential to stay updated in the field. Some key trends and practices that are shaping how software is developed today are highlighted below.

Cloud-native development uses microservices to break applications into independent services, facilitating deployment, scaling, and fault isolation. Technologies like Docker and Kubernetes manage these services, while serverless computing allows developers to focus on coding without worrying about infrastructure. Emerging technologies, such as AI, ML, and blockchain, enhance automation and secure data management, particularly in finance and IoT applications. Additionally, software craftsmanship emphasizes clean code and test-driven development to ensure quality and efficiency throughout the development process. Integrating security considerations into every stage of the software development lifecycle is essential, along with implementing privacy-preserving techniques like data anonymization and differential privacy.

Rapid technological changes and evolving business goals can complicate the maintenance of software, leading to two main approaches: continually adding new features to an existing codebase or consistently refactoring the system. Refactoring improves code structure without changing its external behavior, extending the useful life of software assets and providing ongoing value, although it requires time and careful consideration for capacity planning, as its return on investment may not be immediate.

SAFe creates opportunities for the dedicated focus that increasing technical acumen deserves. However, it’s also essential to cultivate team members’ competence, foster a desire for accountability in deepening learning, and develop a leadership culture that supports growth and learning.

Agile Hardware Engineering

Twenty years ago, businesses faced challenges in delivering value due to software development bottlenecks. The adoption of Agile practices and technologies like virtualization and microservices accelerated execution and innovation, allowing organizations to deliver higher quality quickly. Today, early innovators dominate the software market. Now, hardware organizations can leverage these insights to improve their processes as well. Many organizations have already started this journey (Figure 5). Digital engineering shifts learning to the left.

Building and learning incrementally and integrating frequently is at the heart of Agile hardware engineering. The groundbreaking organizations above have adopted Agile principles to hardware development, moving away from the traditional waterfall methodology. This involves iterative design, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing, allowing for faster adaptation and improvements. Agile hardware engineering competence requires focus in the following areas, with more emerging quickly:

Rapid prototyping and testing: This process prioritizes building and testing physical prototypes quickly to gather real-world data and iterate rapidly on hardware designs.

Modular design: To support the goal of frequent integrations, the system must reasonably and quickly change in development and operational environments. Modular designs that integrate through managed interfaces enable this. Components can evolve independently if they adhere to the interface specifications.

Cross-functional collaboration: Fosters collaboration and communication between different specialized hardware engineering teams to ensure alignment and break down knowledge silos.

Vertical integration and continuous improvement: Prioritizes vertical integration to enable greater control over the hardware development process and faster iteration. Constantly seeks ways to optimize physical processes and hardware designs, learning from every test and failure.

Continuous Value Delivery with DevOps and Built-in Quality

DevOps, a combination of development and operations, fosters a mindset and culture that supports product and solution development and operation through integration, automation, and collaboration. By breaking down organizational silos, DevOps enables the establishment of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP), a high-performance innovation engine capable of delivering market-leading solutions at the speed of business. This pipeline incorporates Continuous Exploration to drive innovation, Continuous Integration to build quality, Continuous Deployment to manage solution releases, and Release on Demand to provide value to customers based on market needs.

To master DevOps and optimize the CDP, organizations can leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for infrastructure automation and version control and implement robust monitoring and observability systems for proactive issue identification. These practices, coupled with Agile architecture principles such as collaboration, emergent design, and design simplicity, enable Agile teams to continuously deliver valuable solutions while adapting to evolving market demands and customer needs. Furthermore, by incorporating rapid prototyping and decentralized innovation, organizations can maintain a competitive edge and deliver market-leading solutions with speed and agility.

Built-in quality emphasizes practices that ensure Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) produce high-quality outputs in all aspects of quality, including compliance, regulation, and customer satisfaction. These practices emphasize adding quality during development instead of just checking for it before release. By doing this, teams can reduce the effort and costs of fixing issues later, which speeds up value delivery.

Quality standards vary based on the context. For example, quality considerations for a multi-player online game are different from those for a dialysis machine. Similarly, quality requirements for a merger agreement differ from those for a self-driving car navigation system. Some quality practices work across different areas, while others are tailored for specific situations. Building in quality requires continuous training and commitment. However, the benefits are worth the investment and include increased customer satisfaction and an improved ability to innovate, scale, and meet compliance needs.

When building high-stakes systems, balancing Agile’s “working software over comprehensive documentation” with the need for rigorous validation can be challenging. Complex systems generate extensive technical information, often subject to regulatory requirements. Traceability is essential to ensure that these systems behave as intended, connecting solution intent to system components. While solution intent can be captured in various ways, from documents to formal models, the chosen methods should not create unnecessary overhead, especially in a DevOps environment where speed and quality are paramount. This balance requires focus to get right.

Measuring and Improving Team and ART Performance

Teams and ARTs effectively use Iteration Goals and PI Objectives to measure whether they are achieving the outcomes they have committed to. These ensure their efforts are focused on the needs of the customer and the business, provide feedback on the progress they are making toward business results, inform the prioritization process, and facilitate work acceptance.

Another important metric for measuring Team and ART health is employee engagement. Employee engagement measures the amount to which individuals feel motivated and actively engaged in supporting the achievement of the organization’s goals and values. Higher levels of employee engagement result in higher productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Consequently, lower levels of employee engagement can lead to poor motivation, lower-quality work, and higher staff turnover.

The six flow metrics, as shown in Figure 8, help Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs) find inefficiencies in their part of the value stream. They can fix these issues by continually applying SAFe’s flow accelerators. The more teams practice with flow metrics and accelerators, the quicker they can spot and solve flow problems.

Agile teams constantly seek ways to improve their process and the outcomes for which they are responsible. As a part of the improvement effort, Agile Teams do the following:

Run routine improvement events – Agile Teams use regular team-level retrospectives throughout the PI, most commonly every iteration. Teams use these events to identify ways they can improve their processes, practices, and behaviors. This focus helps each team to become more high-performing. Additionally, all teams on an ART participate in a joint Inspect and Adapt event to identify improvements that provide benefits across the entire ART for the upcoming PI.

Address impediments immediately – Some problems should be addressed as they occur, without waiting for the next improvement event. Addressing issues as they emerge is part of a culture of continuous improvement.

Share learnings with other Agile Teams – Agile Teams share what they learn as they improve their working practices. This sharing promotes transparency and helps to create a learning culture across the ART and the company.

Summary

Team agility, characterized by self-organizing and cross-functional Agile Teams, fosters a collaborative and empowered environment where team members can take ownership of their work and adapt quickly to changing requirements. This enables teams to respond effectively to challenges and opportunities, ensuring that products and solutions remain aligned with business goals.

Technical agility, demonstrated through practices like the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP), empowers teams to release updates and new features regularly, at a pace ranging from daily to monthly. This rapid release cycle not only fulfills customer needs quickly but also enables swift adaptation based on feedback, ultimately enhancing both product quality and customer satisfaction. The focus on built-in quality within technical practices ensures consistently high standards throughout development. This proactive approach minimizes technical debt and the need for extensive rework, promoting a smoother workflow and a sustainable release cadence.

The combination of team and technical agility allows ARTs to deliver integrated solutions that are both strategically aligned with business objectives and responsive to customer feedback. As a result, organizations benefit from increased productivity, improved collaboration, and competitive advantage, all while fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Last update: 1 April 2025