The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is often used in large-scale software development projects, especially for the automotive industry, as it helps to improve coordination, prediction accuracy, and overall efficiency. However, many organizations, despite having a solid structure in place, cannot fully benefit from the implementation of SAFe. This is due to gaps in inter-team coordination, rigidity in processes, and misalignment with compliance opportunities. Although much research has been done on the adoption of SAFe, not many studies focus on what happens when organizations choose to abandon SAFe after experiencing unmet expectations. This study fills that void by examining the reasons behind the abandonment of SAFe, as well as the challenges faced after moving away from it regarding requirements engineering and testing at an automotive company.

This research aims to examine the underlying reasons behind abandonment of SAFe in automotive software development and to assess how challenges change after migration, particularly in requirements engineering and testing activities. In addition, it examines the alternative methodologies or adaptations companies employ after abandoning SAFe, learning about how teams recreate their workflows, testing methods, and coordination without the SAFe framework.

A qualitative case study approach was used, complemented by semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including engineering managers, product owners, release train engineers, senior developers, and architects. Additional reliability was sought by analyzing additional organizational artifacts, such as Jira tickets, Confluence documentation, and triangulation meeting notes. Thematic analysis was employed to identify recurring patterns and insights in the data collected.

The findings indicate that SAFe was abandoned as it was too prescriptive, created too much overhead, and did not fit into the regulatory needs of automotive software development. Following SAFe, organizations grappled with redefining workflows, coordinating between teams, and adapting testing strategies to attain agility without the formal processesof SAFe. Hybrid frameworks were implemented by a number of teams, while others fell back to tailored traditional approaches, indicating that one size fits all agile framework is not relevant to all organizations.

This study contributes to the current debate on agile scalability in regulated industries by offering empirical evidence on the limitations of SAFe in automotive software development. It offers practical advice to organizations considering or struggling to implement SAFe, emphasizing the need for context-aware agile scaling practices over rigid frameworks.