As a matter of fact, SAFe is popular because of its success scorecard measurement, and apparently followed with the improvement process based on the measured score of its development cycle.

As the success factors, the following points are considered as the improvement measures. It helps the management team to arrive at their success metric. Apparently, the management leads to track the investment and its related business values / returns:

• Cycle time: measurement of the quickest time taken to get one of the features out
• Release cycle: time taken to get a release out
• Defects: measured based on the total number and changes in the defects list
• Productivity: Calculation of the normalized effort to get a unit of functionality done in the software product
• Stabilization: On code completion, a percentage of a release is spent on stabilizing before the release of an enterprise application
• Customer satisfaction: Measurement of the end customer's satisfaction level with the rate of change either up or down
• Employee satisfaction: Measurement of employee group's satisfaction level either up or down

In reality, most firms execute the patchwork approach to transform into Agile methodology from their traditional software development life cycle models. As a result, a heavy sprint backlog is formed due to extensive dependencies to delivery without impediment. Due to these limitations, SAFe has gained traction as a stage-gated cultural framework in the software development process.