Key Leading SAFe terms, acronyms, concepts, and distinctions for final review.
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Use this glossary for short term refreshers, not as a substitute for the Cheat Sheet or Study Plan.
High-yield terms
Agile Release Train (ART): a long-lived team of teams that delivers value on a shared cadence.
PI Planning: the main alignment event where teams and stakeholders plan the next Program Increment together.
Program Increment (PI): a longer planning and delivery window that contains multiple iterations.
Release Train Engineer (RTE): the servant leader and facilitator for the ART.
Built-in Quality: the SAFe expectation that quality is part of the work, not something deferred until later.
Work in Progress (WIP): work already started but not yet finished; too much WIP slows flow and hides constraints.
Program Board: a visual planning artifact showing features, dependencies, and milestones across the PI.
ROAM: a way to classify planning risks as Resolved, Owned, Accepted, or Mitigated.
Portfolio alignment: keeping local delivery choices connected to strategy, value streams, and funding logic.
Lean-Agile mindset: the principles and operating logic that push decisions toward flow, learning, transparency, and decentralization.
Terms that most often change the answer
Spend extra time on terms that separate:
team-level activity from ART or portfolio-level alignment
planning events from the coordination purpose they serve
role titles from actual decision responsibility
flow language such as WIP, dependency visibility, and value delivery from generic agile wording
If a term still feels abstract after you read it here, go back to the lesson where that term changes the stronger answer. Then return to the Cheat Sheet or Practice to test whether the term changes your decision under pressure.