DASSM Sample Questions & Answers

True. PMI states that DAD's Program lifecycle 'describes how to organize a team of teams' for the relatively rare case of large agile teams. Subteams choose their own WoW and can be feature teams or component teams (often combined). Their work is coordinated by the Product Owners, Architecture Owners and Team Leads, and system integration and testing run in parallel. Source: PMI Disciplined Agile, DAD Life Cycle - Program.

Address Changing Stakeholder Needs is the DA Construction process goal that describes how a team manages changing requirements and its work items. Its decision points answer questions such as 'How are we going to manage work items?', 'How are we going to prioritize changes?', 'Who will prioritize changes?' and 'What types of work items will the team address?'. Because DA work item lists include more than new features (defects, technical work such as refactoring, etc.), the prioritization options in this goal help the Product Owner balance new features against technical debt and fixes. Improve Quality covers how the team addresses technical debt, but the prioritization decision itself lives in Address Changing Stakeholder Needs. Source: Disciplined Agile 'Address Changing Stakeholder Needs' process goal (Choose Your WoW!).

A Scrum of Scrums (SoS) meeting is a proven technique for coordinating work and managing dependencies across multiple teams. By including a representative from the Platform team in this forum, the feature teams can raise impediments, discuss upcoming needs, and align on priorities and timelines. This directly addresses the coordination and dependency issues. Mandating process alignment can be counterproductive, and daily stand-ups with all teams are inefficient.

This is the most comprehensive DA approach. It addresses the root cause of the delays—silos and handoffs. Evolving to Disciplined DevOps, embedding skills, automating pipelines, and adopting a flow-based lifecycle (like CD: Lean) directly tackles the identified bottlenecks in the value stream. This focuses on optimizing the whole system, not just individual team processes. Training teams in Scrum doesn't solve the handoff problem, and adding a CAB would likely increase delays.

The GQM approach follows a specific sequence: Goal, then Question, then Metric. After defining a goal, the next step is to formulate questions that break down the goal into quantifiable aspects. These questions then guide the selection of meaningful metrics. Jumping straight to metrics without formulating questions can lead to collecting data that doesn't actually help in achieving the goal.

Agile Modeling (AM), created by Scott Ambler and absorbed into the DA tool kit, is the methodology for collaboratively creating lightweight, 'just barely good enough' models. Its practices include requirements envisioning and architecture envisioning at the start of an endeavor (DA's Inception goals Explore Scope and Identify Architecture Strategy), plus just-in-time model storming and look-ahead modeling later. 'Initial architecture envisioning' is only one AM practice and covers design, not requirements; spiking is a technical experiment; backlog refinement is look-ahead work during Construction. Source: PMI Disciplined Agile Explore Scope process goal ('Agile Modeling (informal) sessions', 'Requirements envisioning').

When retrospectives become stale, changing the format can introduce novelty and prompt the team to think from different perspectives. Formats like 'Mad Sad Glad,' 'Sailboat,' or 'Starfish' provide new structures for discussion, helping to uncover issues and ideas that the standard 'What went well/What didn't' format might miss. This is a key aspect of guiding, rather than just performing, continuous improvement.

Compromising involves finding a middle-ground solution where both parties give up something to reach an agreement. In this case, the Product Owner gives up the immediate release, and the Architecture Owner gives up the full refactoring effort. Each party gets part of what they want, which is the hallmark of a compromise. While collaboration is often the goal, compromise is a practical and common outcome.

PMI's Disciplined Agile 'Context Counts' principle organizes the potential context factors into two categories: selection factors, which drive the initial choice of high-level WoW and in particular the initial lifecycle, and scaling factors (team size, geographic distribution, organizational distribution, skill availability, compliance, domain complexity and solution complexity), which drive detailed tailoring decisions. 'Technical', 'Financial' and 'Stakeholder' are not DA context-factor categories. Source: pmi.org/disciplined-agile Principle: Context Counts.

PMI's Disciplined Agile 'Context Counts' principle organizes the potential context factors into two categories: selection factors, which drive the initial choice of high-level WoW and in particular the initial lifecycle, and scaling factors (team size, geographic distribution, organizational distribution, skill availability, compliance, domain complexity and solution complexity), which drive detailed tailoring decisions. 'Technical', 'Financial' and 'Stakeholder' are not DA context-factor categories. Source: pmi.org/disciplined-agile Principle: Context Counts.

Managing Work in Progress (WIP) limits is a fundamental principle of Kanban and Lean. By limiting the number of items in any given state (e.g., 'In Development,' 'In Test'), teams can reduce context switching, identify bottlenecks more easily, and improve the overall flow of value delivery. This practice helps to move work from 'doing' to 'done' more quickly.