Agile architecture fosters a DevOps culture by ensuring Solutions are architected for continuous delivery. Architects participate in the design and execution of the CD pipeline and evangelize and exemplify SAFe’s CALMR principles. They allow decisions to emerge by defining minimum viable (‘just enough’) architecture, ensuring loose coupling between system elements, supporting the creation and evolution of interfaces, and fostering architecture as code through common annotations, attributes, and naming conventions.

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• Fostering DevOps culture
• Describing how value flows through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
• Architect for and facilitate Continuous Exploration
• Architect for Continuous Integration
• Architect for Continuous Deployment
• Architect for Release on Demand

In the Digital Age, businesses rely on technology to deliver value to their customers. As business strategy changes, the technology, systems, and business applications that deliver that strategy must change with it

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• Describe how Strategic Themes, portfolio canvas and Portfolio Vision influence architecture
• Explain how Value Streams support the business
• Explain how Solution trains and Agile Release Trains deliver value

Aligning architecture with business strategy accelerates business goal achievement.  Architects realize business objectives by translating strategy from strategic themes into solutions.  Those solutions are defined by their Vision, Solution Context, and Solution Intent.  Roadmaps define a plan to realize the solution.  Architects and teams collaboratively define enablers in the roadmap that explore technical options and build the architecture runway, providing early feedback on achieving those milestones.  Teams provide feedback on architectural decisions as they build feature on top of it, balancing intentionality and emergence. The roadmap drives the Backlog which defines all work for an ART. Architects collaborate with Product Management on prioritizing and balancing new functionality with technical work. They anticipate technical debt impediments to flow and architectural runway needs and advocate for their prioritization.

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• Align Solution Vision with Strategic Themes and Solution Context
• Contribute to Solution Intent
• Manage quality with non-functional requirements (NFRs) and Lean Quality Management System (QMS)
• Contribute to Roadmaps

Each increment, teams build the highest priority Features and Enablers.  Architects collaborate with Product Management to define and prioritize these near-term work items.  They provide feasibility insights that help define and scope current Features and their acceptance criteria.  They also consider future Features and define Enablers in the backlog for teams to explore and gain knowledge that ensures the future Feature’s viability.

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• Contributing to the Program Backlog
• Sequence and prioritize work in the Program Backlog
• Contribute to Solution pre-PI Planning

During PI Planning, architects support the teams creating the next increment’s plans.  They present the architectural briefing as part of the planning agenda. As teams create their plans during breakouts, architects roam the room to ensure teams plan technical work properly and ensure they are accounting for the ART’s Enabler work properly.  And they address any questions and concerns.

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• Contribute to PI Planning
• Contribute to management review and problem-solving
• Contribute to Solution post-PI Planning

Architects own the Essential and Solution-level technical and exploration work in Enablers and, as such, guide teams’ progress on their execution.  They may attend those teams’ Sprint Planning and/or Sprint Demo events to track progress, address issues, and adjust direction.  They are also generally available to the teams for coaching, mentoring, and to ensure problems and issues are addressed quickly so that architecture is not a bottleneck.

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• Guide architectures and Continuous Delivery throughout the PI
• Prepare for Iteration Reviews and System and Solution Demos
• Relentlessly improve through Inspect and Adapt (I&A)

Architecture must evolve to meet changing business needs and opportunities. Otherwise, technology becomes the bottleneck for business execution. Changes in business strategy are reflected in new or modified strategic themes which, though the portfolio canvas, translate into new or modified solutions and/or value streams. 

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• Align architecture to Enterprise strategy
• Evolve the Solution Portfolio
• Contribute Enabler Epics to the Portfolio Kanban
• Coordinate across Value Streams

Due to their knowledge and experience, architects are often respected and held in high regard by the development community. Therefore, architects play a key role in any SAFe transformation.  Architects are Lean-Agile Leaders and, as such, model leaner ways of thinking and operating so developers learn from their example, coaching, and encouragement.  They enable autonomy and encourage mastery to grow the development community’s knowledge base and skill set

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• Describes how Architects perform as Lean-Agile leaders
• Describe how to lead the transition to the Agile Architecture during a transformation
• Develop an action plan to support your organization’s transformation