Mapping Your Value Streams

Value streams are an important part of the SAFe®. We saw evidence of this in Chapter 2, Culture of Shared Responsibility, when we looked at the SAFe Lean-Agile Principles and came to Principle #10: Organize Around Value. In that same way, value streams have a key role to play in DevOps. In The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, the authors Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr introduced the concept of the Three Ways. The First Way is to use a value stream to establish flow and this is precisely what we will look at in this chapter.

We will examine how to discover your organization’s value stream and find future optimizations. In all, we will look at the following activities:

• Aligning the organization’s mindset to value streams
• Setting the context for development value streams
• Mapping the development value stream
• Finding areas for improvement

Let’s take a look...