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Development Value Streams

Content Page. Development value streams (DVS) are the sequence of activities needed to convert a business hypothesis into a digitally-enabled Solution.

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The aim of development is, in fact, the creation of profitable operational value streams.

—Allen Ward [1]

Development Value Streams

Development value streams (DVS) are the sequence of activities needed to convert a business hypothesis into a digitally-enabled

Solution⁠

. Examples include designing a medical device or geophysical satellite, or developing and deploying a software application, SaaS system, or an e-commerce web site.

As described in Principle #10, Organizing around value, the value stream concept is a critical underpinning of Lean thinking and fundamental to SAFe. There are two types of value streams described in SAFe. Operational value streams (OVS) are the sequence of activities needed to deliver a product or service to a customer. Examples include manufacturing a product, fulfilling an order, admitting and treating a medical patient, providing a loan, or delivering a professional service. This article describes development value streams (DVS), the sequence of activities teams use to develop and support the products used by operational value streams.

Systems and software developers, product managers, engineers, scientists, and IT practitioners all work in development value streams. That is where they define, build, and deploy the

Solutions⁠

their Customers consume. These customers may be internal — people who are part of an

Operational Value Stream⁠

. Or they may be external customers who directly consume the products and services the enterprise sells and supports.

Details

Development Value streams are the primary organizational model in SAFe. A SAFe portfolio is comprised of them, each dedicated to building and supporting a set of solutions (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. A SAFe Portfolio defines and governs a set of development value streams

For many practitioners in IT and internal development, these solutions may be internal to the business itself; their users/customers are the people within the enterprise who use that system to do their jobs. Others work directly on the products, services, or systems that are delivered to the external customer. Depending on the enterprise’s scope and the configuration of the development streams, many development value streams do some of both.

Value streams also provide the funding mechanism in the SAFe enterprise. Lean Budgets support them and empower the workers who make the day-to-day decisions that optimize economic value. This value is measured, in part, by the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are established to evaluate how the value stream is performing against its role in achieving Enterprise strategy.

Why Organize People in Value Streams?

The reason to organize around value streams is simple: They improve workflow and accelerate time to market. They accomplish this by optimizing the flow of value to the customer across divisions and functional departments, through suppliers, channels, and the whole system.

Value streams offer many benefits, as they:

Enable long-lived, stable teams that focus on delivering value

Identify and visualize all the work necessary to produce solutions

Identify delays, bottlenecks, and handoffs

Support smaller batch sizes of work

Enable knowledge growth and more continuous learning

Indeed, when you start to understand their worth, it makes one wonder how enterprises ever got along without them. Yes, they were always there, but we didn’t see them. [2]

Defining Development Value Streams

Value streams contain all the activities, people, systems, and the flow of information and material necessary to deliver value. While operational value streams vary significantly depending on their purpose, the development value stream steps are fairly standard. Figure 2 illustrates the simplified anatomy of a development value stream.

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Figure 2. Anatomy of a development value stream

The elements are as follows:

The lead time is the time interval needed to move a feature from the date of the request to how it works in the user’s environment.

The value stream is ‘triggered’ by a new feature request, though in reality, many new feature requests are moving through the value stream at the same time.

The ‘steps’ are the activities needed to define, build, validate, and release that value in the solution’s context.

The ‘bar’ between steps indicates the flow and material moving from one step to the next. It also implies the typical “handoffs” of information that occur as people in different steps add value to the process. (This is the home of the notorious ‘batch size’ problem, which is addressed throughout SAFe.)

The ellipses (…) indicate the delays between these steps, typically the largest contributors to long lead times. Thus, decreasing delays is usually the fastest and most efficient way to reduce lead time.

The result is a new increment of the solution, which now contains the additional value these new features provide.

This is obviously an incredibly simplified mental model of what it takes to create innovative technical solutions in today’s digital enterprise. Still, it serves an important purpose: it identifies and analyzes all the activities necessary to deliver solutions and the time it takes to do so. As such:

Understanding and continuously optimizing development value streams may be the most crucial activity in a Lean enterprise.

But this takes far more analysis than the simple figure above. Indeed, that is the entire purpose of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (described later in this article), which every Agile Release Train (ART) uses to deliver small increments of value to their customers.

Aligning Development with Operational Value Streams

The operational value stream article describes how value streams deliver the solutions and support the customer’s need. Indeed, as Ward notes, [1] the entire purpose of development value streams is to make operational value streams — and, thereby, the whole enterprise — more profitable and more efficient in delivering value.

Operational value streams typically fall into one of four categories:

Fulfillment of digitally enabled products and services

Manufacturing

Software products

Supporting value streams

These operational value streams serve very different purposes. So, it stands to reason that the design and outputs of each development value stream are driven by the type of operational value stream it supports. While there is no obvious limit or constraint to ways an enterprise can configure development value streams, specific patterns have emerged. The following sections illustrate some patterns for each of the four operational value stream types, followed by explanatory text.

Fulfillment Value Stream Pattern for Digitally-Enabled Product or Services

The first pattern (Figure 3) revisits the consumer loan example from above. Patterns like this one are fairly common in insurance, banking, financial services, and related industries that offer complex, digitally-enabled products and services to consumers (B2C) and businesses (B2B).

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