The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. SAFe promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams. It was developed by and for practitioners, by leveraging three primary bodies of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking. The Scaled Agile Framework is a freely revealed knowledge base of proven success patterns for implementing Lean-Agile software and systems development at enterprise scale.

The Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, practices, and principles that provide the comprehensive guidance to run a lean enterprise. It’s a set of attitudes centered around respect for people and culture, flow of value, innovation, adaptive learning, and the larger purpose of deducing, producing, and delivering innovative business solutions for the benefit of the customer, employees, and stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Enterprise Solution Delivery is a set of practices and competencies that an enterprise must master in order to build solutions that are fit for purpose and provide the competitive advantage necessary to thrive and grow. The main aspects of this concept include coordinating and aligning people and actions, fostering collaboration between all levels, understanding customer needs, adopting usability standards and validation, system-level quality practices, and managing cyber-physical systems.

Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) is a SAFe concept that represents a shift in mindset for many organizations. With LPM, organizations can execute strategy with a sustainable flow of value, which embraces an iterative planning process. It also establishes portfolio flow by defining the key indicators for measuring the active work within the portfolio and reduces the batch size at the portfolio level to facilitate faster customer value.

Agile Product Delivery is a customer-centric approach to defining, building, and releasing a continuous flow of valuable products to customers and users. The key aspects of Agile Product Delivery are: Customer Centricity and Design Thinking which ensures that the final product is well received by its customers and users, Develop on Cadence and Release on Demand which allows for faster responses to the market, and DevOps and Release on Demand which ensures that the final product is of high quality and reliable.

Team and Technical Agility is about applying effective Agile practices to create high-performing Agile teams. It focuses on defining, building, testing, and delivering an increment of value in a short time box. This concept emphasises on the need for a cross-functional team, including business people and developers, to work together on a daily basis throughout the project. The focus is not just on iterative delivery of features, but also on the quality of the product, achieved by practices like continuous integration, pair programming, test-driven development, etc. It drives technical excellence and good design that enhance agility.

The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, incrementally develops, delivers, and where applicable operates, one or more solutions in a value stream. ARTs align teams to common business and technology missions. Each ART is a virtual organisation (typically 50 – 125 people) that plans, commits, and executes together. ARTs are organised around the enterprise’s significant value streams and live indefinitely.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline is the workflow that takes features from idea to valuable, validated, and released software. It consists of four aspects: Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand. The pipeline represents the idea of 'develop on cadence, release on demand' – use cadence to manage the development process and use synchronization and planning to ensure that system-level assets are available when needed. But use market events to trigger actual deployments and releases.

DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices. It provides communication, integration, automation, and close cooperation among all the people needed to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a solution. Release on Demand is the process of decentralizing deployment decisions, enabling the functionality to be released continually in a fluid model that meets the needs of the end users. In the SAFe approach, DevOps and Release on Demand are interconnected concepts aiming at high business Agility.

Lean Systems Engineering (LSE) is an approach that applies Lean-Agile values and principles to the specification, development, deployment, operation, and evolution of complex, cyber-physical systems. LSE encourages systems thinking, a focus on the system’s lifecycle, and an understanding the role of the system in the larger systems (system of systems). It employs model-based systems engineering and other tools, along with Agile methods, to create effective, knowledge-based work systems.

Organizational Agility is another significant part of a SAFe. It is all about creating a flexible, adaptive organization that responds quickly to changes and new opportunities. The key here is not only to be proactive in identifying factors that might affect an organization but also to be reactive to unforeseen changes. Organizational agility involves moving away from traditional organizational hierarchies and processes to more flexible, dynamically changing structures. It focuses on innovation, adaptiveness, and encourages organizations to embrace a culture of learning and a mindset of continuous improvement.

Agile Architecture is a crucial concept of SAFe that helps create an underpinning for effectively achieving and maintaining business alignment and technical agility. It is a set of practices that support the active evolution of system architecture, intentional architectural design and modelling, allowing continuous delivery. Agile architecture is shared between multiple teams to provide an overarching vision to technical aspects of the system or solution, multifaceted in its design to accommodate changes, ensuring the system’s fitness for its purpose.

Continuous Learning Culture is a pivotal SAFe concept that cultivates a learning organization where team members constantly enhance their competence. It fosters a Culture of relentless improvement where both the organization and the individual are committed to learning, and sharing that knowledge with others. This culture empowers individuals and teams to learn from their successes and failures, constantly improve, innovate, and achieve better outcomes. This concept is strongly associated with relentless improvement, a core value of SAFe.