SAFe emphasizes transparency and addressing root causes. The team should make the impact of technical debt visible and negotiate with the Product Owner to include remediating the most critical debt in their PI Objectives. This balances new feature development with necessary sustainability work, creating a realistic plan. Simply overcommitting or ignoring the problem violates the principle of built-in quality.

The Daily Stand-up is a 15-minute timeboxed event for synchronization and planning the next 24 hours. Its purpose is to identify impediments, not solve them. The Scrum Master should coach the team to adhere to the timebox and the three standard questions. In-depth problem-solving should be taken offline by the relevant subset of the team immediately after the stand-up, preserving the event’s focus and efficiency.

The Product Owner is responsible for managing the backlog and prioritizing work based on value and alignment with PI Objectives. The demo is a feedback session, not a planning meeting. The correct action is to acknowledge the feedback, capture it (often in the form of a new story or feature), and then evaluate it against other backlog items during the regular refinement process. This maintains backlog integrity and prevents context switching for the team.

The IP Iteration serves multiple critical functions. It provides a cadence-based buffer for estimating variability, but its primary purposes are to host the PI System Demo and the Inspect & Adapt workshop. It also allocates dedicated, protected time for teams to work on innovation, exploration, infrastructure, and planning for the next PI, which are essential for long-term health and adaptability.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a SAFe practice that creates a shared understanding by defining story acceptance criteria as concrete examples using a structured ‘Given-When-Then’ format. This collaborative technique bridges the communication gap between stakeholders and the team, ensuring everyone agrees on what ‘done’ means before implementation begins, which is a key aspect of refining backlog items to a ready state.

In Agile teams, the focus is on team outcomes, not individual performance. A significant and consistent disparity in contribution can be a symptom of underlying problems such as work not being collaboratively pulled, specialized work (silos), or a team member taking on too much. The Scrum Master should first seek to understand the root cause through respectful, private conversation and observation, then address any systemic issues with the whole team to improve collaboration and flow.

A core principle of SAFe is decentralizing decision-making. The RTE’s role is to facilitate and unblock the ART. The best approach is to bring the right people together (the involved teams) to collaboratively solve the problem. A focused, facilitated session during planning allows teams to create a shared understanding and establish a team-to-team dependency or interface agreement, which is then tracked on the program board. This builds team ownership and is faster than escalation.

The Economic Framework is a set of decision-making guidelines that communicate how value flows in the organization. It includes elements like development horizons, time horizons, and decision-making authority. Its primary purpose is not detailed accounting, but to empower Lean-Agile Leaders and teams to make good, fast, local decisions that are aligned with the broader business strategy and financial constraints, enabling decentralized control.

The team’s Definition of Done (DoD) is a checklist of required activities that apply to all stories to ensure a consistent level of quality. Even if specific acceptance criteria are met, all items in the DoD must be completed. In this case, a proper DoD for a UI story would likely include ‘UI reviewed for compliance with standards (e.g., accessibility).’ The story is not ‘done’ until the DoD is fully satisfied, preventing the accumulation of technical debt.

SAFe emphasizes transparency and addressing root causes. The team should make the impact of technical debt visible and negotiate with the Product Owner to include remediating the most critical debt in their PI Objectives. This balances new feature development with necessary sustainability work, creating a realistic plan. Simply overcommitting or ignoring the problem violates the principle of built-in quality.0