DASSM Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) Exam Questions and Answers

According to Disciplined Agile and broader agile principles, complex adaptive systems, such as software development environments, cannot be fully understood by analyzing individual parts in isolation. The nature of complex adaptive systems is that they involve multiple interacting components, and their behaviors emerge from these interactions. Therefore, understanding the whole system requires examining the relationships, feedback loops, and patterns that arise within the entire context, not just the individual parts. This concept is grounded in systems thinking, a key component in agile methodologies, which encourages viewing the system holistically.

Performingsystem integration testingmore frequently helps identify integration issues early, reducing the cost and time associated with fixing problems discovered later in the development cycle. Continuous integration testing is a core practice in Agile and Disciplined Agile that ensures changes are regularly validated, promoting a smoother integration process. Conducting integration tests more often allows the team to catch defects early and maintain a stable and reliable build.

Options B (adding team members) and C (testing only at the end) are not best practices as they do not address the root cause of the problem. Option D (finding a way to do less integration testing) contradicts Agile principles, which emphasize frequent testing.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The FLOW view in Disciplined Agile does not mean that there are no starts and stops in any DA project. Rather, it emphasizes optimizing the flow of work through the system by minimizing delays, reducing bottlenecks, and removing unnecessary handoffs. However, starts and stops may still exist due to various factors such as dependencies, changing priorities, or external constraints.

The "Marketing" process blade in the Disciplined Agile framework provides strategies to ensure successful interactions with the external world about your organization, products, and offerings. Marketing focuses on understanding customer needs, communicating the value proposition of products and services, and engaging effectively with potential and current customers to build brand awareness and drive sales. Other options like Portfolio Management (A), Product Management (B), Sales (C), and Business Operations (D) have different focuses and do not specifically cover the broad external communication strategy and positioning that Marketing does.

A long-lived (stable) team is one that remains intact over multiple projects or iterations, allowing team members to develop strong relationships, trust, and a deep understanding of each other's skills and working styles. This stability leads to two key benefits:

Highly Collaborative:Stable teams develop effective communication and collaboration patterns, which enhance their ability to work together efficiently. They understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and can leverage this knowledge to optimize teamwork and problem-solving.

Trustworthy:Long-lived teams build trust over time, which is essential for open communication, risk-taking, and innovation. Trust enables team members to feel safe sharing their ideas and concerns, which leads to higher engagement, morale, and productivity.

Options A (Projectized) and B (Specifically resourced) are incorrect as they do not directly represent the benefits of having a stable team. Option E (Ability to multi-task) is less relevant, as Agile promotes focused work rather than multi-tasking.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

According to the I.N.V.E.S.T. mnemonic, a good user story should be:

Independent:Can be developed and delivered without dependencies on other stories.

Negotiable:Flexible in details and open to discussion.

Valuable:Must deliver value to the customer or end-user.

Estimable:Can be estimated to gauge effort required.

Small:Sized appropriately to be completed within an iteration.

Testable:Should have clear criteria to determine whether the story is complete.

"Valuable" is a key characteristic that ensures the user story contributes to the product's value. Options A (Incremental), C (Tangible), and D (Satisfactory) are not part of the I.N.V.E.S.T. mnemonic.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

For an Agile or Lean project team, the aim of the Inception phase is to "perform sufficient work to initiate the endeavor and obtain agreement as to the overall vision with their stakeholders."The Inception phase involves developing a shared understanding of the project's vision, objectives, and scope, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and have agreed on the goals. While options A, B, and C involve planning, modeling, or building, the primary goal of the Inception phase is to set a clear direction and establish alignment among stakeholders.

The principle "Choice is good" in Disciplined Agile does not mean that a team must present multiple products to customers and let them choose. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of providing teams with choices regarding the practices and strategies they adopt, tailored to their unique context. This principle allows teams to make informed decisions on their Way of Working(WoW), rather than being restricted to a prescribed set of processes. Thus, the correct answer is "False," as the principle focuses on flexibility and adaptability for the team, not on presenting multiple product options to customers.

The Continuous Delivery Lean life cycle is suitable when there is an experienced team working on a product or service where the requirements change frequently, potentially daily. This life cycle supports frequent deployments and quick feedback loops, making it ideal for environments where requirements are dynamic and evolve rapidly. Options A, D, and E do not align with the conditions that necessitate a Continuous Delivery Lean approach, as they involve either less experienced teams or slower-evolving requirements.

Disciplined Agile (DA) provides a robust foundation for business agility by offering a flexible and comprehensive toolkit that allows organizations to tailor their Agile practices to their specific context. Two key ways DA achieves this are:

Provides guidance to streamline processes in a context-sensitive manner:DA emphasizes tailoring Agile practices to the organization's unique context, recognizing that one size does not fit all. It provides guidance on how to optimize processes based on specific needs and constraints.

Describes the trade-offs associated with a range of options:DA offers a variety of strategies and practices for teams to choose from and provides insights into the trade-offs of each choice. This enables teams to make informed decisions that best suit their goals and organizational context.

Options A, C, and E do not directly describe how DA provides a foundation for business agility. While DA encourages adherence to standards and fostering team joy, its core contribution lies in its flexibility and practical guidance.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The Minimum Business Increment (MBI) is a tool used in Disciplined Agile to sequence work in a way that delivers value quickly. An MBI represents the smallest piece of functionality that delivers business value to customers or stakeholders, and it is fully usable upon release. By focusing on MBIs, teams can prioritize work that maximizes the delivery of value, ensures faster feedback, and enables quicker realization of benefits.

Options A (Planning Poker) and C (Minimum Viable Product, MVP) are related to estimation and product development strategies, while Option C (WIP limits) focuses on managing workflow efficiency rather than directly sequencing work for quick value delivery.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

Disciplined Agile (DA) emphasizes the use ofautomated measuresto enable data-driven decision-making in projects. This is aligned with the Disciplined Agile Manifesto and principles, which focus on pragmatism, the use of relevant metrics, and fostering continuous improvement within teams.

In Disciplined Agile, metrics are viewed as tools that provide objective insights into project health and progress. The use of automated measures helps to minimize human error and bias, and enhances the reliability of the data being collected. Automated metrics can include lead time, cycle time, throughput, defect rates, and other quantitative data points that can be generated from automated tools (such as Jira, Azure DevOps, etc.). These metrics allow teams to make informed decisions swiftly and adjust their practices and processes based on actual data.

The DA mindset also promotes outcome-oriented metrics rather than activity-oriented ones. This means teams focus on the end results and the value being delivered, rather than just measuring tasks completed or the amount of work done. By favoring automated and objective measures, DA ensures that teams base their decisions on accurate and timely information rather than subjective opinions or potentially misleading scalar measures.

This is also supported by the DA principle that encourages “Optimize Flow Across the Entire Value Stream” – which relies on data-driven decision-making to effectively manage and optimize processes. Overall, automated measures align with DA's goal of achieving agile goals in a pragmatic, context-sensitive manner.

The primary purpose of a Community of Practice (CoP) in the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework is to share knowledge among a group of like-minded people. CoPs bring together people who share a common interest or practice, enabling them to exchange insights, experiences, and best practices to enhance their collective expertise. Options B (bringing all the experts together) and D (mentoring, coaching, and guiding others) are secondary benefits but not the primary purpose. Option C (selling a competency) does not align with the purpose of a CoP.

The statement "The implementation of this blade will be standard across domains" isfalseabout the Business Operations process blade. In Disciplined Agile (DA), the Business Operations process blade involves strategies for providing services to the business and ensuring operational effectiveness, but its implementation will vary depending on the specific context, domain, and organizational needs. DA emphasizes tailoring practices to fit the unique circumstances of the organization, so a one-size-fits-all or standard implementation is not appropriate.

Options A (collaboration with Sales and Marketing), B (providing services to the business), and D (focusing on delighting customers) are true aspects of the Business Operations process blade.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The principle "Organize around products/services" meansbuilding dedicated cross-functional teams focused on customer offerings. This approach ensures that teams are aligned directly with the delivery of customer value, with all the necessary skills to deliver a complete product or service. This organization enhances focus, collaboration, and efficiency, driving greater value delivery to customers.

Option A (asking customers to pick from available products) does not reflect this principle, and Option C (project teams being best equipped) does not align with the DA emphasis on long-standing, product-focused teams over temporary project teams.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

Agile teams, as per the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, can deliver non-software projects. The DA toolkit is designed to be adaptable and applies agile and lean principles to a wide range of business domains beyond software development. This flexibility allows agile teams to use iterative and incremental approaches to manage various types of projects, such as marketing campaigns, event planning, and other organizational initiatives. Thus, it aligns with the PMI's stance that agility can benefit all types of projects, not just software-focused ones.

Even when a project follows a Scrum or Agile lifecycle, it still needs the Inception, Construction, or Transition phases as described in Disciplined Agile (DA). These phases provide a structured approach to project delivery. The "Inception" phase involves initial planning and alignment, "Construction" focuses on iterative development, and "Transition" ensures the final product is ready for release. While Scrum and Agile frameworks focus on iterative and incremental development, DA uses these phases to ensure a comprehensive approach to project management.

Setting appropriate expectations about release timings with the customer isnot typically the responsibility of team membersin a disciplined agile team. This responsibility usually falls to the Product Owner, who acts as the liaison between the team and the customer, managing expectations and ensuring alignment on priorities and timelines.

Options B (self-organizing), C (evolving their way of working), and D (evolving the architecture with the help of the architecture owner) are responsibilities of team members in a disciplined agile team.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

For a long-term project with potential for significant budgeting and tracking overhead, the Scrum Master should set up a long-standing team. According to the Disciplined Agile framework, long-standing teams are stable teams that remain intact across multiple projects or over a long duration. These teams are cross-functional, meaning they have all the necessary skills to deliver value and are more likely to develop high levels of collaboration and productivity over time. While cross-functional teams (B) are a necessary characteristic, "long-standing team" (A) is the best answer for a long-term project with significant overhead, as it implies continuity and sustained team dynamics. A project team (C) is typically formed for a short-term, specific project and disbanded afterward. A shared services team (D) provides specialized skills and services to various teams and is not typically suited for the dedicated effort required by long-term projects.

In theContinuous Delivery Leanlife-cycle model, a Disciplined Agile team needs to have high levels of skill and organization because this model involves continuous delivery of small, incremental changes. Teams must manage a smooth flow of work, maintain high quality through automation, integrate changes frequently, and respond rapidly to customer feedback. This requires sophisticated technical practices, strong cross-functional collaboration, and disciplined work management to ensure a continuous stream of value delivery.

Options A (Program), C (Scrum), D (SAFe), E (Continuous Delivery Agile), and F (Exploratory) also require specific skills but do not generally demand the same level of continuous and lean-oriented discipline as Continuous Delivery Lean.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

When tailoring an agile strategy within the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, the two process goals that require the most effort are"Align with Enterprise Direction"and"Explore Scope."These goals are critical because they provide a foundational understanding and alignment with both the organization's strategic objectives and the specific scope of the project or product being developed.

Align with Enterprise Direction:

Effort Required: Tailoring an agile strategy requires significant effort to ensure alignment with the overall enterprise direction, including strategic goals, corporate culture, compliance requirements, and governance policies. This involves understanding and integrating the broader organizational objectives into the team’s way of working (WoW).

Why It Is Important: Ensuring alignment with the enterprise direction is vital for maintaining consistency across different teams and departments and for achieving long-term organizational goals. It helps in leveraging shared resources, standards, and practices, reducing risks, and fostering collaboration.

Disciplined Agile Context: In the DA toolkit, "Align with Enterprise Direction" ensures that teams are not working in silos but are contributing to the broader organizational strategy and that their actions support the enterprise’s vision and values.

Explore Scope:

Effort Required: Exploring the scope involves understanding the breadth and depth of the problem space, gathering requirements, and defining what needs to be built. This can be a complex and time-consuming effort because it requires collaboration with multiple stakeholders, eliciting requirements, and managing changes.

Why It Is Important: This process goal helps ensure that the team understands the scope of the work to be done and aligns its efforts accordingly. It involves prioritizing features, defining acceptance criteria, and creating a shared understanding among all stakeholders.

Disciplined Agile Context: "Explore Scope" in the DA framework is critical because it lays the foundation for what the team will work on. It helps manage stakeholder expectations, prioritize work, and align deliverables with customer needs and organizational objectives.

Contrasting Incorrect Options:

A. Improve Quality: While improving quality is essential in any agile strategy, it typically involves applying established practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), and automated testing, which may not require as much initial effort compared to aligning with enterprise direction or exploring scope.

D. Address Changing Stakeholder Needs: Addressing changing stakeholder needs is part of the agile process, but the effort involved depends on how frequently and significantly those needs change. This goal is more of an ongoing activity rather than an initial effort required for tailoring an agile strategy.

In the PMI Disciplined Agile framework, the timely delivery of the product as committed is ultimately the responsibility of the entire team. While the Product Owner (Option A) provides direction and prioritization of work, and the Team Lead (Option B) facilitates the process, it is the collective responsibility of the Team Members (Option C) to deliver the product incrementally and meet commitments. Agile teams operate under the principle of shared responsibility and accountability for outcomes, meaning every team member contributes to the delivery process. Other roles, such as Gold User (Option D) and Architecture Owner (Option E), have specific responsibilities but are not accountable for the delivery timeline.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, the Iteration Demo is the ceremony where the team presents the work completed during the iteration to stakeholders and other team members. This is the primary opportunity to obtain feedback on the increment of product or work that was developed. The feedback gathered during this demo is crucial for making any necessary adjustments in subsequent iterations. Other ceremonies like Daily Stand-up (B), Iteration Planning (C), or Retrospective (D) have different focuses. For example, Retrospective (D) is used for process improvement feedback, not product feedback.

"Ensure production readiness" is one of the process goals in the transition stage of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework. During the transition phase, the team focuses on finalizing the product and preparing it for release, which includes activities like final testing, user training, and deployment planning to ensure the solution is ready for production use. Options A (Produce a potentially consumable solution) and B (Develop common vision) are more aligned with earlier phases, such as Inception or Construction. Option D (Address risk) is a goal throughout the lifecycle but is not specific to the transition phase.

"Enterprise awareness" in the Disciplined Agile framework means understanding and considering the needs and goals of the broader organization while making decisions at the team level. It does not mean standardizing processes across all teams; rather, it encourages teams to align with organizational objectives and practices in a way that fits their unique context. Therefore, the statement is false. Standardizing processes would contradict DA’s core principle that "Context Counts," which supports flexible and situationally appropriate process choices.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) approach, the role of a team lead, such as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach, includes supporting team members and helping them overcome obstacles. Option B reflects this mindset: having a conversation with the team member to understand the root causes of their struggle and collaboratively seeking solutions. This approach aligns with agile principles of servant leadership, empathy, and collaboration. It encourages open communication, trust-building, and personal development, which are core to maintaining a high-performing and motivated team.

Providing time management training (Option A), holding a one-on-one meeting focused on failures (Option C), or redistributing work without addressing underlying issues (Option D) are less aligned with the values of Disciplined Agile, as they do not directly address the specific impediments faced by the team member or promote a supportive and growth-oriented team culture.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI

Using Lean thinking, we should be managingthe value stream. Lean thinking focuses on optimizing the entire flow of value from the initial customer request to the delivery of the final product or service. Managing the value stream involves identifying and eliminating waste, reducing delays, and ensuring smooth flow across all steps in the process to deliver maximum value to the customer. Lean emphasizes managing the process flow rather than micromanaging individual steps or people, allowing for continuous improvement and more efficient operations.

The primary role of the Product Owner in Disciplined Agile is to "build the right product." This means the Product Owner is responsible for defining and prioritizing the product backlog, ensuring that the development team works on features that deliver the most value to the stakeholders and align with the business objectives. The Product Owner acts as the voice of the customer, making critical decisions about the product's direction, features, and functionality. The other options (B, C, and D) may involve activities related to product development, but they do not encompass the core responsibility of building the right product.

Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) is a four-step iterative process used for continuous improvement. It helps teams to better understand the effectiveness of their actions and identify opportunities for improvement. The cycle involves planning an action (Plan), executing it (Do), studying the results (Study), and acting on what is learned (Act). While reflecting on whether the team is working on the correct things (B) or improving plans (C) are parts of continuous improvement, PDSAis primarily aimed at understanding and improving the results of actions. Option D (providing justification when something goes wrong) is not the purpose of PDSA.

Theteam leadisnot responsible for securing fundingfor the team. In a Disciplined Agile framework, funding responsibilities typically fall under the purview of management or a sponsor. The team lead focuses on enabling the team, removing impediments, facilitating collaboration, and coaching the team toward effective delivery practices.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

Disciplined Agile (DA) is an agnostic hybrid approach that draws upon various ideas, principles, and practices from multiple agile and lean methodologies, including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, and others. It does not adhere strictly to one methodology but instead provides a toolkit that allows teams to tailor their ways of working based on their specific context, objectives, and constraints. Options B (Agile), C (Iterative), and D (Lean) are more specific frameworks or approaches, whereas Disciplined Agile explicitly combines multiple methodologies in an agnostic manner.

An advantage of aproject teamas opposed to long-standing product teams is agreater focus on delivery and short-term goals. Project teams are typically formed to achieve specific, time-bound objectives, and their primary focus is on delivering the project outcomes within the set timeframe. This can lead to an intense focus on immediate deliverables and short-term results.

Options A (motivation to learn and evolve the WoW) and D (bringing work to the team) are more applicable to long-standing teams, while Option C (long-term focus) is not typically an advantage of project-based teams.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

In the context of the construction phase of a project, "Prove Architecture Early" is a relevant process goal. During this phase, it is critical to validate the chosen architecture to ensure that it will support the desired functionality and meet quality requirements. This goal focuses on reducing technical risks by building architectural spikes or prototypes to validate key architectural decisions. This helps the team confirm that the architecture is sound before investing heavily in development. Other options like "Explore Scope," "Develop Test Strategy," and "Form Team" are activities relevant to earlier phases (such as inception).

Pushis when work isgiven to people. In a "push" system, tasks or work items are assigned to individuals or teams regardless of their current capacity or workload. This can lead to overburdening, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks. In contrast, a "pull" system allows team members to take on new work only when they have the capacity to do so, promoting smoother flow and reducing waste. Agile methodologies generally favor a pull approach to optimize flow and enhance team autonomy and efficiency.

TheProduct backlogis the artifact that collects all the work flowing to the team. It contains a prioritized list of user stories, tasks, enhancements, bug fixes, and other work items that represent the overall scope of the product development effort. The Product Owner manages the backlog, ensuring it is continuously refined and updated to reflect changing priorities and requirements. The iteration backlog (option B) is a subset of the product backlog items that the team commits to delivering in a single iteration, while the business backlog and release roadmap are not typically used to collect all work items for a team.

We can identify our challenges "by visualizing our workflow to identify what blocks it." Visualizing the workflow, such as through a Kanban board or value stream map, helps teams see where bottlenecks, delays, or inefficiencies occur. This visualization makes it easier to pinpoint problems and areas for improvement. While holding retrospectives (B), finding where frustrations arise (C), and trying good practices to identify failures (D) are all valuable techniques, visualizing workflow is a foundational Lean practice for identifying and addressing challenges in real time.

When changing legacy code, the recommended approach in Disciplined Agile is to "Add a test first, then change it." This practice is aligned with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and ensures that any modifications made to the legacy code do not introduce new defects. By writing tests before making changes, you establish a safety net that confirms the existing functionality remains intact, and the new changes work as expected. Rewriting the code (B), delegating the task (C), or changing the code before adding tests (D) can increase risk and are not recommended practices.

The principle ofpragmatismin Disciplined Agile does not mean that the team will always do what the customer wants. Instead, it means that the team will make practical decisions based on the specific context, constraints, and overall business goals. The team may sometimes need to challenge or refine customer requirements to ensure that the solutions provided are feasible, valuable, and sustainable.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The primary role of the Product Owner in Disciplined Agile is to ensure that the team builds the right product. This includes defining and prioritizing the product backlog, making decisions on behalf of stakeholders, and ensuring that the team understands the product vision and customer needs. Options A (coordinate the product), B (organize the product team), and C (inspect the product) are aspects of the Product Owner's responsibilities, but they do not capture the overarching goal of delivering the right product to meet customer needs.

The process goal most likely to offer potential techniques to address concerns that the development team does not understand the overall business process isExplore Scope. In Disciplined Agile, "Explore Scope" focuses on defining and understanding the scope of the project, including the business processes that are relevant to the product being developed. It involves techniques such as creating process maps, using business process modeling, or conducting domain workshops to help the team understand the overall business context and requirements. This ensures that the development team has a comprehensive understanding of the customer requirements and the broader business environment in which the product will be used.

During the Inception stage of a Disciplined Agile project, the team typically focuses on defining the project's vision, goals, and scope, as well as identifying high-level architecture and a test strategy. The deployment strategy, which details how the product will be released to the users, is generally determined later in the project when more is known about the product's architecture and functionality. Therefore, "B. Deployment strategy" is the correct answer, as it may not be decided during the Inception stage.

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The primary purpose of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is toestablish the validity of a hypothesisby testing a prototype with real customers. In Disciplined Agile, an MVP is a minimal version of a product designed to test assumptions and learn about market needs with the least amount of effort and resources. By putting a prototype in front of customers, teams can validate or invalidate their hypotheses, gather user feedback, and make informed decisions on future development. This aligns with the lean and agile principle of delivering value quickly and efficiently while minimizing waste. Other options, like committing to continuous improvement or creating a marketable product, are secondary to the core purpose of hypothesis validation through MVPs.

User stories are a key component in Agile practices, including the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework. They are typically described by the acronym INVEST, which stands for:

Independent: User stories should be self-contained, so they do not overlap with others.

Negotiable: User stories are not contracts; they should leave room for discussion and refinement.

Valuable: Each user story must deliver value to the end user or customer.

Estimable: A good user story can be estimated in terms of the effort required to complete it.

Small: User stories should be small enough to be completed within a single iteration.

Testable: A user story must be testable, meaning it should be possible to determine whether the user story has been completed successfully.

Based on the INVEST criteria, "Achievable" is not a recognized feature of a user story. While achieving a user story is an implicit goal, it is not explicitly mentioned in the standard definition or characteristics used in Agile frameworks such as Disciplined Agile. The features that are essential to a user story are "Negotiable," "Estimable," and "Testable," as they ensure the story is clearly defined, measurable, and valuable to the user.

References:

Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise, Scott Ambler & Mark Lines.

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM) and Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) training materials.

While "Delight customers" is an important goal in agile and Disciplined Agile (DA) practices, it is not listed as one of the key principles to keep in mind when choosing and evolving a team’s Way of Working (WoW). The key principles are "Pragmatism" (A), "Choice is good" (C), and "Context counts" (D). These principles emphasize practical decision-making, recognizing that different situations require different approaches (choice is good), and tailoring the WoW to the specific context.

In the Disciplined Agile framework, the principle of "Context Counts" emphasizes the importance of tailoring practices to fit the specific situation or context of the team. In this scenario,the team decided to skip the daily standup meetings because they were co-located, and the meetings were not adding value. This is an example of making a context-specific decision based on the team's unique circumstances, which aligns with the DA principle of "Context Counts." Options A (Being awesome), B (Enterprise awareness), and D (Choice is good) do not accurately capture the rationale behind the decision to modify the practice based on context.

In the Disciplined Agile framework, a "process blade" represents an organizational capability that addresses a specific need or problem within an organization. Process blades provide guidance on how to effectively implement a particular capability (such as finance, governance, or portfolio management) in a context-sensitive manner. They are not meetings (Option A), specificgoals or visions (Option C), or cross-functional teams (Option D); instead, they are resources or guidelines that help the organization improve its processes and capabilities.

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The primary risk addressed by thestakeholder vision milestoneisthat your primary stakeholders agree to your strategy. This milestone ensures alignment and consensus among key stakeholders regarding the project's overall vision, goals, and strategic approach. Achieving this agreement is critical to securing buy-in, support, and commitment from stakeholders, which helps to mitigate the risk of misalignment and conflicting expectations as the project progresses. Other risks, like architectural strategy viability, business case viability, or a realistic release plan, are addressed by other specific milestones or checkpoints in the Disciplined Agile framework.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, the role of "Team Member" is primarily responsible for building the product right. Team members, who possess the necessary skills and expertise, work collaboratively to develop, test, and deliver the solution according to the agreed-upon requirements and standards. While the Team Lead (B) facilitates the process and the Product Owner (C) ensures the right product is being built by prioritizing features and managing the backlog, it is the Team Members who actually perform the development work. The Architecture Owner (D) ensures the architectural integrity of the solution but is not solely responsible for building the product itself.

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In the context of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, if a team is about to begin work on a project where releases are expected only every six months or so, and the team does not have an agile mindset or desire to release often, the "Traditional" lifecycle is most appropriate. The Traditional lifecycle, also known as a predictive or waterfall lifecycle, is suitable for teams or projects that require extensive planning and where changes are infrequent or less welcome. This approach matches well with a mindset that is not inclined towards frequent releases or iterative development, allowing for longer, planned intervals between releases, which aligns with the six-month release cadence described in the scenario.

DevOpsis a key competency in Disciplined Agile, aiming to create a smooth flow of work from development through to operations. This involves practices such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and automated deployment, which help to reduce cycle time, improve feedback loops, and ensure the product is always in a deployable state. The focus is on integrating development and operations to deliver value to customers more rapidly and reliably.

Options B (using developers for operations), C (automating testing), and D (involving operational teams in development) are components of DevOps practices, but the primary goal is to establish a seamless workflow.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The correct answer isC. Accelerate value delivery. In the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, the process goal"Accelerate value delivery"typically requires significant tailoring to suit the specific needs, context, and constraints of the team and the organization.

What is "Accelerate Value Delivery"?

The process goal"Accelerate value delivery"focuses on optimizing the flow of work and reducing delays in delivering valuable outcomes to customers. This goal encompasses various practices and techniques such as reducing batch sizes, implementing continuous integration and delivery, enhancing team collaboration, removing bottlenecks, and improving overall efficiency in delivering products or services.

Achieving this goal requires careful consideration of the team's context, technology stack, existing workflows, and the organization's unique challenges and constraints. As a result, "Accelerate value delivery" is highly tailored to ensure that the selected practices are effective in a specific environment.

Why "Accelerate Value Delivery" Requires a Lot of Tailoring:

Tailoring is necessary because different teams and organizations have varying capabilities, maturity levels, cultural norms, and existing processes. For example, one team might need to focus on improving their DevOps practices, while another may need to address process inefficiencies or enhance cross-functional collaboration.

In Disciplined Agile, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to accelerating value delivery. Teams are encouraged to choose from a range of strategies and techniques that best suit their particular circumstances. This flexibility means that teams must continually assess and adapt their approaches to achieve optimal results, which requires significant customization and tailoring.

Why the Other Options Are Not Correct:

A. Form team:While forming a team may require some tailoring based on the project's needs and team composition, it is generally a more straightforward process with less variation in how it is executed compared to accelerating value delivery.

B. Prove architecture early:This process goal typically involves establishing the technical foundation of the solution early in the project. While it may require some adaptation based on the project's architecture, it does not involve the same level of ongoing tailoring as optimizing the flow of value delivery.

D. Improve quality:Although improving quality involves adopting practices that suit the team's context, it does not typically require as much tailoring as "Accelerate value delivery." Quality improvement is often about adhering to established standards and best practices, which can be more consistent across different teams and projects.

Therefore,C. Accelerate value deliveryis the correct answer because it inherently involves a high degree of customization to adapt the approach to the unique context and constraints of the team and organization, consistent with Disciplined Agile's emphasis on context-driven agility.

The Exploratory Life Cycle is adopted when there is a need to bring a new product or service to market, and the customer requirements are uncertain. This life cycle is characterized by a high degree of exploration and experimentation, where the team continuously learns and adapts based on customer feedback and market conditions. Options A and B are incorrect because they refer to evolving an existing product or service rather than bringing a new one to market. Option E is also incorrect because it assumes the requirements are well understood, which would not necessitate an exploratory approach.

Business Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt quickly and effectively to market and environmental changes, responding with innovative solutions and maintaining competitiveness. This concept involves a broader strategic capability beyond just implementing agile processes; it requires an organization-wide mindset of flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous improvement. Options A, B, and D reflect narrower or less comprehensive aspects that do not fully encompass the broader concept of Business Agility.

In Disciplined Agile, the amount of work to be completed during an iteration is defined by the team members themselves, based on their understanding of their current capacity and velocity. The team collaboratively estimates what they can achieve and commits to completing that work. Option A (the Product Owner) is responsible for prioritizing the backlog but does not dictate the amount of work. Option B (the team lead) facilitates the process but does not decide the work. Option D (the quality tester) is involved in testing completed work but does not determine the iteration's workload.

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