SAFe Backlogs 1.3 - Capabilities

Capabilities 

Description:

Truth be told, capabilities and features are almost exactly identical. They both have the same four pieces, they both use the same grooming process, and they both have the same scoping.

Almost.

The single thing that makes capabilities and feature different is that a capability lives in the Solution Backlog, therefore it should talk about functionality that will take multiple ART's to deliver. Traditionally this might be in the form of a product that requires software, hardware and firmware to deliver; such as a cell phone or autonomous vehicle; things along those lines. In these cases, the development staff might be divided into a software ART, a hardware ART and a firmware ART, as an example.

You can easily see that those three trains would have deep cross-train dependencies on each other. So, the Large Solution Level is used to manage and clarify these dependencies. The capability is the work item that does that. If an epic breaks down into functionality that can be delivered by a single train, that goes straight to the Program Level and its features. This level only has items that are cross-train, that discipline will help keep the cross-train dependencies clearly visible and trackable.

Resources:

Any and all of the teams sitting on one or more ART's. Since individual trains are roughly estimated to be up to about 120 people, it's easy to envision solution trains of thousands of people.

Timebox:

Even at the Large Solution Level the basic unit of time is still the Program Increment - 10ish weeks of work. This can throw a lot of people who are new to SAFe, but it makes sense. The point of agility is that you do NOT do all of your planning up front, you parse it out over chunks of time. Well, ten weeks seems to be a sweet spot between being able to predict and being able to deliver and being able to respond to changes. So we stick with the PI as the basic unit of time.

The MMF:

See the above entry for MMF under the Features section.

Enabler Capabilities:

Exactly the same as enabler feature and stories, but the resource scoping is for more than one ART. Otherwise the same.