SAFe Knowledge Base » System Team

    System Team

    The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

    —Aristotle, Paraphrased from Metaphysics [1]

    Definition: The System Team is a specialized Agile team that assists in building and supporting the Agile development environment, including developing and maintaining the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. They may also support the integration of assets, end-to-end solution testing, DevOps mindset and practices, deployment, and release on demand.

    Details

    The growing complexity of modern software systems can dramatically affect the speed, quality, and flow of delivering value to customers. The most defining characteristic of today’s infrastructure is that it’s “diverse to a fault” [2]. It’s easy for developers to lose focus,  splitting their time between managing the issues associated with highly complex software development toolchains and delivering customer value.

    Moreover, everyone has a cognitive limit to how much information they can hold in their minds at any moment. The primary reason to have a System Team is to increase the ART’s speed, quality, and productivity without jeopardizing the team’s ability to deliver new solution value. Agile Teams have an ever-increasing workload. Besides creating new solution value, teams are expected to continuously test, deploy, release, and even operate Solutions. To be more efficient and have economies of scale, the ART may need the help of a System Team so that they can focus most of their time on solution development.

    The System Team accelerates the ART’s velocity and reduces the cognitive load on development teams by building and maintaining the Agile development environment infrastructure, for example:

    • The creation and maintenance of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline toolchain. This toolchain encompasses continuous integration, automating builds (including verification testing), deployment, and release.
    • Creating platforms and environments for development, user acceptance testing, solution demonstration, deployment, and production.
    • Facilitating the technical elements of collaborating with third parties like hosting and data service providers.
    • Ensuring the ART has an intentional architecture for the infrastructure and that teams use standard tools and DevOps practices.

    Responsibilities