But what about…?

These are the five responses you are most likely to meet. Each answer points back to the guide, which carries the full account.

“It’s a stepping stone — you have to start somewhere.”

The framework does not hand back a route onward, and organisations that adopt it do not, in the cases observed, arrive anywhere.

Al Shalloway describes adoptions stagnating within three to six months and often leaving companies worse off than before they began.

A stepping stone that leaves you further from the bank is not a stepping stone.

“We just need to implement it properly. The next version fixes this.”

James Shore’s observation is that organisations adopt it with great fanfare and quietly drop it several years later.

Ron Jeffries published a detailed and constructive list of problems. Subsequent versions did not address them.

This defence also cannot be tested. If every disappointing outcome is evidence of insufficient adoption, then no outcome can ever count against the framework. That is a property of the argument, not of the evidence.

“That’s bad implementation, not the framework.”

The organisations in the guide are a Swedish industrial manufacturer, a French marketplace, an Australian bank, a Swedish car maker, an American consumer hardware company, a global technology consultancy and the United States Air Force. Several were assisted directly by the framework’s own consultants, and three were published or showcased as successes.

Different sectors, countries and levels of capability, and the same shape of outcome. At that level of variation, the constant is the framework.

“Adoption is still growing. The market has decided.”

It is, and the guide says so.

Market share measures purchasing, not results. The guide also records the countervailing signals: experienced practitioners declining engagements involving it, senior leaders describing stalled and abandoned adoptions, and more organisations asking for people who are not tied to any scaled framework.

“This is just the Agile community protecting its territory.”

Consider who is speaking.

Two of the original SAFe Principal Contributors and Program Consultants, who left. The authors of the practices the framework assembles — Jeff Gothelf on Lean UX, Dave Farley on Continuous Delivery, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland on Scrum — each saying their work has been altered into something that does not function. Eight signatories of the Agile Manifesto. The Chief Software Officer of the United States Air Force, who has no stake in any of it.

The guide is also explicit that its argument is with the framework and not with the people who teach it, many of whom it describes as capable professionals.

This page is a summary written by this site. It is derived from the 2024.8 edition of Information for decision-makers considering the SAFe framework, an independently curated, community-reviewed document licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The guide is the source and carries the full evidence and every original reference. Where this page and the guide differ, the guide is correct.