Tag: SAFe

How to Create Balance in Your Team with the Help of SCRUM and Taylor Swift

I recently found myself at a Taylor Swift concert. Yes, that’s what happens when you have teenage children. But while listening to her song “Shake It Off,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the importance of making sure that we shake up our product development environment and culture every once in a while. As […]

Our SCRUM Metrics

Here we are, rolling out SCRUM across our teams, having teams practice the process and deliver customer value.  We needed to figure out a simple way to measure the effectiveness of our rollout.  Measuring the effectiveness has two parts: Part 1 How effective were we in changing team behaviors, making our team members and product […]

SCRUM and RACI

As we have been putting SCRUM into the organization, it has me thinking about how to help the teams understand roles and responsibilities in the new SCRUM formation.  We use RACI (defined below) internally to help dictate everyone’s understanding of who makes which decisions and why. One of the best articles on the subjects of […]

Losing the Trees through the Forest

I have written a number of articles for this blog about our adoption of the SAFe framework for scaling Agile. However, it became obvious in late 2014 that we had a fundamental problem. No matter how well we did release planning, epic prioritization, or release trains, it wasn’t getting us where we need to go. […]

Managing Technical and UX Debt

Constant Contact recently released one of our first release planned and executed with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), known externally as our Toolkit release.  There will  be a future post about some of the lessons learned from that experience, We see  major release as an opportunity to do a retrospective on our process. This post […]

When to Use the Agile Release Train

[Editor’s note: This post about using the Agile Release Train is the third is a series of posts by Mike Adler chronicling the Constant Contact engineering organization’s journey of transitioning to the SAFe Framework.] As an organization that develops world-class SaaS software, we want to leverage the benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery processes.  […]

How Many X Should We Have?

In my last blog post I described our engineering organization and our selection of the Scaled Agile Framework to help us organize our Agile engineering teams.  Throughout the last month, we have been socializing and teaching the Epic/Feature/Story hierarchy to the product organization.  As part of this rollout, one of the transitions that we have […]

Scaling a Great Engineering Organization with SAFe

This year we’ve begun to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) at Constant Contact to help us structure our product, business, and architectural efforts so that our organizational and business growth scales effectively. Great engineering organizations build great products. However, building a great engineering organization and keeping it executing for the business is never easy. Constant […]