SAFe-Agilist Scaled Agile SAFe 6 Agilist - Leading SAFe (SA) (6.0) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Strategic themes are an example of differentiating business objectives. Strategic themes are specific, itemized business objectives that connect a portfolio to the enterprise strategy. Strategic themes provide guidance and direction for portfolio vision, budget allocation, value stream identification, epic prioritization, and metric definition. Strategic themes help differentiate a portfolio from its competitors and create a unique value proposition for its customers. References: SAFe Portfolio, Strategic Themes

The Lean Budget Guardrails defined in SAFe include "Guiding investments by horizon" as one of the main components. This ensures strategic alignment and responsible use of funds.

“Fund Value Streams; Lean budgets and Guardrails… Value Stream budgets adjusted dynamically…”

In the SAFe Workbook under Principle #1 ("Take an economic view"), it states:

“Deliver early and often. Deliver value incrementally… Accelerates feedback and learning, allows early and continuous delivery.”

This principle is illustrated using the difference between waterfall and Agile delivery models.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Pages 2-26 to 2-28

From the Workbook’s Portfolio Kanban section:

“Once an Epic is approved with a Lean business case, it moves to the ‘Ready’ state in the Portfolio Kanban system, provided it receives a 'go' decision from Lean Portfolio Management (LPM).”

This marks the transition from analysis to readiness for implementation.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Page 5-32

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In SAFe 6.0, the Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS) describes the steps that enterprises take to rapidly respond to new opportunities and deliver value. The steps are:

Sense Opportunity

Fund MVP

Organize Around Value

Connect to Customer

Deliver MVP

Pivot or Persevere

Deliver Value Continuously

(Source: Scaled Agile Framework – Business Agility Value Stream)

The workbook clearly outlines:

"Business Owners assign business value (BV) scores to PI Objectives from 1 (low) to 10 (high) after negotiation. These scores help teams understand what is most important to the business."

Source: SAFe Workbook, PI Planning Simulation Section

The SAFe Workbook outlines the elements of enterprise strategy formulation and emphasizes:

“Enterprise Strategy Formulation includes Vision, Mission, Core Values, Business Drivers, Competitive Environment, Financial Goals, and Distinctive Competence.”

Among these, Portfolio Vision is identified as a direct outcome that aligns the portfolio with strategy.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Page 5-12

The SAFe workbook defines "Leading by Example" as a foundational behavior of Lean-Agile leaders. They do this through:

Insatiable learning

Authenticity

Emotional competence

Courage

Growing others

Decentralized decision-making

The workbook explicitly states:

“Leaders model desired professional and ethical behaviors… and apply SAFe's Lean-Agile Mindset, values, principles, and practices.”

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The foundation of SAFe is the Lean-Agile mindset, which is based on two primary knowledge areas:

The House of Lean (values of respect for people, flow, innovation, and relentless improvement)

Agile Manifesto values and principles

Together, these form Mindset, Values, and Principles, which underpin all other aspects of SAFe.

(Source: Scaled Agile Framework – Lean-Agile Mindset)

From the workbook's role definitions:

"Scrum Master/Team Coach Responsibilities: Supporting Iteration Execution, Improving ART Performance, Facilitating PI Planning, Building High-Performing Teams."

This makes "supporting iteration execution" a primary responsibility.

Source: Workbook, Lesson 3.1, Page 3-7

According to SAFe Principle #8, "Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers," beyond purpose and mission, this principle emphasizes that:

“Management sets the mission with minimum constraints… Workers themselves are most qualified to make decisions about how to perform their work.”

This aligns with promoting autonomy, mastery, and purpose—autonomy being enabled by minimal constraints from management.

SAFe describes Continuous Deployment as:

“An aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline that enables faster delivery of new functionality to customers.”

By automating the pipeline and decoupling deployment from release, enterprises can release value more frequently and responsively.

According to the SAFe Workbook:

“The Continuous Delivery Pipeline represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to deliver new functionality more frequently… It enables continuous exploration, integration, deployment, and release on demand—fostering ongoing learning.”

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Pages 4-81 to 4-84

According to the SAFe Agilist 6.0 domain of Lean Thinking, a value stream is triggered by a demand for some value, such as a new feature, a change request, or a defect fix1. A feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need2. Therefore, a feature request is a valid trigger for a value stream.

A spike request is a type of exploration enabler that addresses technical uncertainty or risk3. A user story request is a type of backlog item that represents an end user goal or function4. These are not triggers for a value stream, but rather work items that flow through a value stream.

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap provides an ordered sequence of transformation activities. After training leaders, the next step is:

“Identify Value Streams and ARTs – this step is essential to organizing around value, ensuring future trains are aligned with value delivery.”

The workbook section on the Program Board notes:

“ART Planning Board Legend: Blue – Features; Red or Pink – Significant Dependency”

These visual elements are used during PI Planning to show feature delivery timelines and cross-team dependencies.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Page 4-58

Cadence and synchronization are applied in events like PI Planning:

“PI Planning provides cadence-based alignment of multiple Agile Teams… Synchronization allows all stakeholders to align and collaborate.”

Lean Portfolio Management is responsible for managing the Portfolio Kanban. The Portfolio Kanban is a method for visualizing and managing the flow of portfolio epics from ideation to implementation and completion. The Portfolio Kanban helps align strategy with execution, prioritize demand with capacity, reduce cycle time and variability, and foster collaboration and feedback. Lean Portfolio Management is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. Lean Portfolio Management aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. References: Lean Portfolio Management, Portfolio Kanban

This is how SAFe describes Customer Centricity. Customer Centricity is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. Customer Centricity means putting the customer at the center of everything the enterprise does, and understanding their needs, desires, and problems deeply. Customer Centricity also means adopting a mindset that focuses on observing and learning from customer behaviors that produce the best innovations, rather than relying on assumptions or opinions. Customer Centricity helps enterprises deliver solutions that delight their customers and achieve market differentiation. References: Customer Centricity