What is SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)?
SAFe is the most widely adopted framework for running agile across many teams: Agile Release Trains (5–12 teams on one value stream, synchronized on 8–12-week Program Increments), PI Planning (everyone plans together, in person or virtually), and portfolio-level lean budgeting connecting strategy to team backlogs.
Its critics call it heavyweight; its adopters are usually enterprises that need alignment across hundreds of developers. The exam wants the vocabulary: ART, PI, PI Planning, release train engineer.
Worked example
An insurer's claims platform involves nine teams. As independent Scrum teams, integration was quarterly chaos. As one release train, all nine plan a Program Increment together every ten weeks — dependencies mapped on one board, one demo cadence, one integrated definition of done. The teams lost a little autonomy and stopped losing whole sprints to surprise collisions.