SAFe SSM flashcards
SAFe SSM · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Three pillars of empiricism
- Scrum's empirical foundation: transparency makes work and results visible, inspection checks progress toward goals, and adaptation adjusts process or product when results deviate.
- Scrum values
- Commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. In SAFe these values underpin team self-management and the Lean-Agile mindset.
- Iteration in SAFe
- SAFe's term for the Scrum Sprint: a fixed-length timebox, typically two weeks, in which the team delivers a working, tested increment.
- Scrum artifacts
- Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment. Each carries a commitment: the Product Goal, the Sprint Goal, and the Definition of Done respectively.
- Scrum events
- The Sprint container, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. SAFe complements the review with an iteration demo and an ART-level System Demo.
- Servant leader
- The Scrum Master's stance: serving the team through impediment removal, coaching, and enabling self-management, rather than directing or assigning work.
- Scrum Master process authority
- The SM owns how Scrum is applied, teaching and upholding the framework's rules, while the team owns its technical and delivery decisions.
- Impediment escalation path
- Team-level blockers are handled by the Scrum Master; blockers beyond team authority are escalated to the RTE or STE for ART-level resolution.
- Coaching stance
- The Scrum Master favors questions, observation, and feedback over instruction, moving between teaching, coaching, mentoring, and facilitating as the team matures.
- SM support to Product Owner
- The Scrum Master helps the Product Owner by facilitating backlog refinement, story splitting, and PI objective definition without taking over product decisions.
- Scrum Master Community of Practice
- A self-organizing group of Scrum Masters and team coaches in the ART who share patterns, tools, and improvement ideas to raise overall flow.
- PI Planning duration
- A two-day event at the start of each Program Increment where all ART teams align on a shared mission and draft iteration-by-iteration plans.
- PI Objectives
- SMART statements describing what a team intends to deliver in the Program Increment; Business Owners assign each objective a business value from 1 to 10.
- Committed versus uncommitted objectives
- Committed objectives are what the team will deliver; uncommitted or stretch objectives are aspirational and excluded from predictability calculations.
- ROAM
- A risk-handling technique used in PI Planning: each risk is Resolved, Owned, Accepted, or Mitigated, with a named owner and follow-up action.
- Confidence vote
- A fist-of-five poll at the end of PI Planning; a team average of three or more allows the plan to proceed, while lower scores trigger replanning.
- ART planning board
- The visual board of team objectives, features, and cross-team dependencies arranged by iteration across the PI; it was formerly called the program board.
- Iteration Goal
- A single sentence describing the business value the team intends to deliver in the iteration; it guides story selection during Iteration Planning.
- Daily Stand-up
- A 15-minute event at the same time and place where team members inspect progress toward the Iteration Goal and surface impediments; it is not a status report.
- WIP limits
- Explicit caps on work in each Kanban column that expose bottlenecks and force the team to finish existing work before starting new items.
- Iteration Review
- A team-level demonstration of the working increment to stakeholders, combined with a review of metrics and adjustment of the team backlog.
- Predictability measure
- Actual business value delivered divided by planned business value for a Program Increment; it is calculated at PI level, not per iteration.
- Built-in quality
- Embedding quality in every increment through XP techniques such as continuous integration, test-driven development, refactoring, and an up-to-date Definition of Done.
- Inspect and Adapt
- The final event of the PI, combining a PI System Demo, quantitative measurement, and a problem-solving workshop that produces improvement backlog items.
- PI System Demo
- An ART-level integrated demonstration at the end of the Program Increment where stakeholders assess whether the solution met the PI objectives.
- Problem-solving workshop
- The I&A segment where the ART root-causes its biggest issues using techniques such as 5 Whys or fishbone, then creates owned improvement backlog items.
- Planned versus actual business value
- At Inspect & Adapt, the business value a team planned is compared with what it delivered, feeding ART predictability and next-PI capacity.
- Improvement backlog
- A prioritized list of actions from the I&A workshop; items carry owners, may be planned into the next PI, and are tracked by the RTE.
- AI as co-pilot
- AI drafts agendas, summaries, and retrospective themes to save the Scrum Master time, but a human reviews, decides, and stays accountable for outcomes.
- Prompt structure
- A well-formed prompt states role, context, constraints, desired output format, and examples; specificity directly drives the usefulness of the result.
- AI hallucination risk
- Generative AI can produce plausible but false content, so every AI-generated summary, metric, or recommendation must be verified before use.
- Responsible AI in SAFe
- Transparency, accountability, privacy, and fairness govern AI use, and no sensitive customer data or intellectual property goes into unapproved tools.