Why Disciplined Agile?

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This article explores why you should consider adopting the Disciplined Agile
(DA) toolkit from several points of view:

1. Agile Practitioner
2. Agile Team
3. Agile Coach
4. Executive

Why Should Agile Practitioners Adopt

Disciplined Agile?
There are several reasons why an agile practitioner should be interested in
the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit:

1. DA is agnostic and pragmatic. The DA toolkit puts hundreds of practices and techniques
from a variety of sources, including Scrum, Spotify, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban,
Agile Modeling, SAFe, Unified Process, DevOps, and many more. DA puts these
techniques into context for you in an agnostic and pragmatic manner and provides advice
for how to choose the best way of working (WoW) for you given the situation that you face.
2. Context counts. You are a unique person with a different background, different skills,
different priorities, different preferences, and different experiences than your colleagues. A
technique that is effective for someone else may not work well for you, and vice versa.
Because your context is unique you need to have choices for how you can work, the DA
toolkit captures a wide range of choices and puts them into context for you.
3. Become more effective. An important strategy to becoming more effective as a
professional is to experiment with different WoW to see what works well for you in the
situation that you face. The DA toolkit provides you with ideas and options that you can
experiment with, and provides the information you need to identify strategies that are more
likely to work for you. Because DA is agnostic it’s not limited to the techniques of a single
method or framework. As we like to say, choice is good.
4. Distinguish yourself from other agile practitioners. Many agile practitioners like to get
certified in a single method or framework and then focus on that. But you can do better than
that and instead choose to hone your craft by learning a wide range of techniques from a
 variety of sources. The DA toolkit is a great starting point to learning about the bigger
picture.

Why Should Agile Teams Adopt Disciplined

Agile?
There are several reasons why an agile practitioner should adopt the
Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit:

1. Disciplined Agile Deliver (DAD) addresses the full agile process. DAD is the portion of
the DA toolkit that addresses the software development, or more accurately solution
delivery, process. For an agile software development team DAD does the heavy process
lifting for you that methods such as Scrum or SAFe leave up to you. The implication is that
with DAD your team needs to spend less time identifying their way of working (WoW) and
can instead focus on providing real value for your stakeholders.
2. Your team can learn how to break out of method prison. Ivar Jacobson has coined the
term “method prison ” to refer to how methods such as Scrum, or frameworks such as
SAFe, limit your WoW through prescribing how they believe your team should work. These
methods can give you a good start, but eventually you reach the limits of whatever they
focus on and you need to go beyond their advice. But other than platitudes claiming that
you can easily modify them they don’t really give you any advice to do so. The DA toolkit,
however, takes a completely different approach and instead provides you with a collection
of options and the trade-offs associated with them. This helps your team to evolve their
WoW more effectively so that you can be awesome!
3. Optimize workflow. The DA toolkit looks at the whole, organizational picture. Yes, you
may not need to worry about the whole picture but you need to be enterprise aware enough
to know how you fit into that picture so that you can optimize the overall workflow in which
you’re involved. Just as important, DA looks at all aspects of the work. For example, where
Scrum focuses on collaboration and management strategies but not technical ones, the
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) portion of the DA toolkit considers all aspects of
solution/product development from beginning to end. This includes collaboration,
management, architecture, design, testing, coding, governance, and many more
considerations in a coherent manner. You have a much better chance at optimizing flow,
and thereby increasing your effectiveness, when you know how it all fits together.

Why Should Agile Coaches Adopt Disciplined

Agile?
 There are several reasons why an agile coach should be interested in the
Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit:

1. Extend your knowledge-base. An an agile coach you can never know about too many
potential practices or techniques. This in turn will enable you to provide better advice to the
teams that you’re working with.
2. DA is agnostic agile. DA isn’t limited to a single method or framework. Furthermore, it isn’t
even limited to agile. DA brings in ideas from lean sources and traditional sources. Good
ideas are good ideas no matter what the source.
3. Distinguish yourself from other coaches. There are a lot of people these days claiming
to be Agile coaches. Having a solid understanding of the DA toolkit and how to apply it in
practice will give you an edge over the majority of coaches who only know Scrum or SAFe.

Why Should Executives Adopt Disciplined

Agile?
There are several reasons why your organization should adopt the Disciplined
Agile (DA) toolkit:

1. Support for the entire range of complexities faced by your teams, not just team
size. Every person, every team, and every organization is unique. The implication is that
you need a toolkit that provides you with choices so that you can tailor, and later evolve, an
approach to address the situation that you face in practice. Although prescriptive, one-size-
fits-all frameworks such as SAFe or Nexus may seem like an attractive, easy solution to
your process-related needs at first the reality is that they don’t address the full range of
complexities that you face. Force-fitting them where they don’t apply often does more harm
than good.
2. DA is agnostic agile. DA adopts pragmatic techniques from a wide range of sources –
agile sources, lean sources, and even traditional sources – and does the work of putting
them into context so that you don’t have to. Because DA is agnostic it’s not restricted to the
ideas of a single method, or even a single paradigm. DA provides you with choices and
provides lightweight advice for you to choose the techniques that are most appropriate for
the situation that you face – better decisions lead to better outcomes.
3. DA enables you to increase your rate of process improvement. Organizations that are
successful at improving their WoW do so via a series of small, experiment-driven
improvements: a strategy called Kaizen. The DA toolkit provides straightforward guidance
for identifying potential improvements that are likely to work in the context that you face,
enabling your teams to reduce the number of failed experiments and thereby increase their
rate of improvement.
4. Support all types of teams, not just software teams. There are four layers to the DA
toolkit – Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Disciplined DevOps, Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT),
and Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) – only the first of which focuses on software teams.
Your marketing team, your procurement team, your sales team, and many others can all
benefit from becoming more agile. An important observation is that where most agile
methods or framework focus on teams, typically software development teams, the DA
toolkit helps you to optimize your organizational way of working (WoW) too.
5. Consistent governance across disparate teams. Traditional management teams often
become concerned when they hear that every team is unique and will choose and then
evolve their own WoW. This can be scary when you realize that you need to guide and
govern all of these teams. Luckily, it’s not only possible but highly desirable to have a light-
weight, lean governance strategy in place. In fact, the DA toolkit has process blades for IT
Governance and enterprise-level Control that directly addresses lean governance at the
DAIT and DAE levels respectively.
6. Disciplined Agile is the foundation for business agility. We’ve been talking about
teams a lot, but it’s not just about teams. It’s really about how your organization can
become more competitive, how it can regularly delight your customers, and how it can
continue to evolve and improve over time. It’s really about business agility, and the DA
toolkit shows how it all fits together.
 A Hybrid Toolkit
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Disciplined Agile (DA) is a hybrid that builds upon the solid foundation of other
methods and software process frameworks. DA adopts practices and
strategies from existing sources and provides advice for when and how to
apply them together. In one sense methods such as Scrum, Extreme
Programming (XP), Kanban, and Agile Modeling (AM) provide the process
bricks and DAD the mortar to fit the bricks together effectively.

DA adopts strategies from the following sources:

 Scrum. The Scrum method focuses on team leadership and requirements change
management during the construction portion of the delivery lifecycle. Scrum
captures some really great ideas that have become commonly adopted by agile
teams.
 Extreme Programming (XP). XP is an agile method that focuses primarily on
construction-oriented practices such as continuous integration (CI), test-driven
development (TDD), pair programming, sustainable pace, small releases, simple
design, and many others. Although XP’s practices appear straightforward on the
surface, many of them require significant technical skill and discipline on the part
of practitioners.
 Lean software development. Practitioners of agile development are increasing
looking to adapt ideas from lean thinking. Lean software development is based on
seven principles: Eliminate waste, amplify learning, decide as late as possible,
 deliver as fast as possible, empower the team, build integrity in, and see the
whole.
 Kanban. Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on
just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. In this approach, the
process, from definition of a task to its delivery to the customer, is visualized and
team members pull work from a queue or work item pool.
 Unified Process (UP). The UP is an iterative and incremental process framework
for software development. Although often instantiated as a heavy-weight
approach, it has in fact been instantiated in a very light weight and agile manner,
particularly in the form of Agile Unified Process (AUP) or OpenUP. The DA toolkit
adopts and enhances several critical governance strategies from the UP.
 Agile Modeling (AM). AM is a practice-based methodology for effective modeling
and documentation of software-based system. AM was purposely architected to be
a source of strategies which can be tailored into other base processes, something
DAD takes explicit advantage of. AM strategies adopted by DA include initial
requirements and architecture envisioning, just in time (JIT) model storming,
continuous documentation, and several others.
 Agile Data. The Agile Data (AD) method defines a collection of strategies that IT
professionals can apply in a wide variety of situations to work together effectively
on the data aspects of software systems. Practices for evolutionary/agile database
development include database refactoring, database regression testing, agile data
modeling, and continuous database integration.
 Scaling Frameworks. Frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus address
tactical scaling strategies, particularly for large programs organized as a team of
teams (typically a team of Scrum/agile teams).
 Other methods. DA adopts techniques and practices from other methods such as
Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM), Feature Driven Development
(FDD), Evo, Outside-In Development (OID), and Crystal Clear.
 Other frameworks. We’ve started to adopt leaned-out strategies from the ITIL,
COBiT, TOGAF, and DAMA frameworks (to name a few) to flesh out
the Disciplined DevOps and Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT) portions of DA.
 Agile development practices. There are many practices that are not specific to
agile methods that have been developed within the agile community, and DA
leverages many of them.
One of the great advantages of agile and lean software development is the
wealth of practices, techniques, and strategies available to you. This is also
one of its greatest challenges because without something like the DA toolkit
it’s difficult to know what to choose and how to fit them together. In many
ways Disciplined Agile (DA) does the “heavy process lifting” for you in that it
shows how all of these great ideas fit together, enabling you to get on with
your actual job which is to produce great solutions for your stakeholders.
 The Disciplined Agile Manifesto
Share
We are uncovering better ways of working (WoW) by doing it and helping
others to do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Consumable solutions over comprehensive documentation
Stakeholder collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to feedback over following a plan
Transparency over (false) predictability
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, disciplined agilists value
the items on the left more.

The Principles Behind the Disciplined Agile

Manifesto
1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the stakeholder through early and continuous delivery of
valuable solutions.
2. Welcome emerging requirements, even late in the solution delivery lifecycle. Agile
processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver valuable solutions continuously, from many times a day to every few weeks, with
the aim to increase the frequency over time.
4. Stakeholders and developers must actively collaborate to deliver outcomes that will delight
our organization’s customers.
5. Build teams around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they
need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a delivery
team is face-to-face conversation, ideally around a whiteboard.
7. Continuous delivery of value is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable delivery. The sponsors, developers, and users should
be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
enabled by organizational roadmaps and support.
12. The team continuously reflects on how to become more effective, then experiments, learns,
and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
13. Leverage and evolve the assets within your enterprise, collaborating with the people
responsible for those assets to do so.
14. Visualize work to produce a smooth delivery flow and keep work-in-progress (WIP) to a
minimum.
15. Evolve the entire enterprise, not just individuals and teams, to support agile, non-agile, and
hybrid teams.
16. We measure our work and its outcomes, preferring automated measures over manually
gathered ones, to make data-led decisions.
17. We provide complete transparency to our stakeholders in everything we do and produce, to
enable open and honest conversations and effective governance of our team.

The Disciplined Agile Manifesto is an extension of the original Manifesto for

Agile Software Development , written in 2001, that reflects the philosophies
behind the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit. For a discussion of our thinking
behind this manifesto, see Extending the Agile Manifesto – 2018 .
Disciplined Agile Posters

This page contains links to a collection of posters that may be downloaded, printed,
and put on your office walls. For reach one there is a high-quality PDF that you can
print out if you like. The posters are:

 The Disciplined Agile Manifesto

 Disciplined Agile Toolkit Overview
 Disciplined Agile Principles
 Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT) Workflow
 DAD Process Goals
 Transformations: People, Process, and Tools
 DAD Lifecycles
 Minimal Viable Product (MVP) - How Can We Deploy a Better Product Faster?
 Tactical Scaling Infographic
 Other Informational Posters
 Motivational Posters
The Disciplined Agile Manifesto

The Disciplined Agile Manifesto (PDF, A3) lists both the values and principles
of the Disciplined Agile evolution of the original Agile Manifesto.

Disciplined Agile Toolkit Overview

The Disciplined Agile Toolkit Overview (PDF, 58cm by 40cm) overviews the
four layers of the DA toolkit and the process blades within them.

Disciplined Agile Principles

The Disciplined Agile Principles Poster (PDF, 58cm by 40cm) overviews the
seven principles underlying the DA toolkit.

Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT) Workflow

The Disciplined Agile IT poster (PDF, 8.5"x11") depicts the high-level workflow of a
DA IT process.

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Process Goals

The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Process Goals poster (PDF,

8.5"x11") overviews the 23 process goals of the DAD portion of the DA toolkit. This
is a very good reference to remind people, at least at a high level, the range of
issues that they need to consider to be successful at agile solution delivery.

Transformations: People, Process, and Tools

The Transformations: People, Process, and Tools Poster (PDF,
8.5"x11") summarizes the reality faced on agile transformation journeys. The first
value of both the Agile Manifesto and the more recent Disciplined Agile Manifesto is
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", pointing out that all are
important. This is a great poster to put on the wall to remind you that although the
majority of your effort will focus on people/cultural issues (individuals and
interactions) a portion of it will still need to focus on improving processes and
supporting tooling.

DAD Lifecycles

You can download a poster for each Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) lifecycle:

 The DAD Agile (Scrum-Based) Lifecycle (prints well on 11" by 17")

 The DAD Lean (Kanban-Based) Lifecycle (prints well on 11" by 17")
 The DAD Continuous Delivery: Agile Lifecycle (prints well on 8.5" by 11")
 The DAD Continuous Delivery: Lean Lifecycle (prints well on 8.5" by 11")
 The DAD Exploratory/Lean Startup Lifecycle (prints well on 8.5" by 11")
 The DAD Program (Team of Teams) Lifecycle (prints well on 8.5" by 11")

Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

The How Can We Deploy a Better Product Faster Infographic (PDF,
11"x8.5") overviews the relationship between a Minimal Viable Product (MVP),
Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF), Minimal Marketable Product (MMP), and a
Minimal Marketable Release (MMR).

Tactical Scaling Infographic

The Tactical Scaling Infographic (PDF, 11"x17") summarizes results from the
2016 Agile Scaling study (November 2016) around agile team size, geographic
distribution, domain complexity, technical complexity, regulatory compliance,
and organizational distribution. How does your team compare?
Informational Posters
DAD Phases

 Inception phase overview

 Construction phase overview
 Transition phase overview

Miscellaneous

 Certification Roadmap
 Disciplined Agile Data Warehousing (DW)/Business Intelligence (BI) (prints well
on 11" by 17")
 Rights and Responsibilities on Disciplined Agile Teams

Motivational Posters
 got discipline?
 Our Mission: Deliver high quality solutions
 Sorry about the noise... our agile teams are building something
valuable! Construction version
 Sorry about the noise... our agile teams are building something valuable! People
version
 Today's plan: Do Epic Stuff
 Today's plan: Produce value

Unless otherwise specified, the posters can be easily printed on standard-

sized (A3) paper.
 The Disciplined Agile Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of working (WoW) by doing it and helping others to do it. Through this work
we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Consumable solutions over comprehensive documentation
Stakeholder collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to feedback over following a plan
Transparency over false predictability

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, disciplined agilists value the items on the left more.

The Principles Behind the Disciplined Agile Manifesto

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the stakeholder through early and continuous delivery of valuable solutions.
2. Welcome emerging requirements, even late in the solution delivery lifecycle. Agile processes harness change for the
customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver valuable solutions continuously, from many times a day to every few weeks, with the aim to increase the
frequency over time.
4. Stakeholders and developers must actively collaborate to deliver outcomes that will delight our organization’s
customers.
5. Build teams around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get
the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a delivery team is face-to-face
conversation, ideally around a whiteboard.
7. Continuous delivery of value is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable delivery. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a
constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams enabled by organizational
roadmaps and support.
12. The team continuously reflects on how to become more effective, then experiments, learns, and adjusts its behavior
accordingly.
13. Leverage and evolve the assets within your enterprise, collaborating with the people responsible for those assets to
do so.
14. Visualize work to produce a smooth delivery flow and keep work-in-progress (WIP) to a minimum.
15. Evolve the entire enterprise, not just individuals and teams, to support agile, non-agile, and hybrid teams.
16. We measure our work and its outcomes, preferring automated measures over manually gathered ones, to make
data-led decisions.
17. We provide complete transparency to our stakeholders in everything we do and produce, to enable open and
honest conversations and effective governance of our team.

The Disciplined Agile Manifesto is an extension of the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development, written in 2001,
that reflects the philosophies behind the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit. For a discussion of our thinking behind this
manifesto, see Extending the Agile Manifesto – 2018.

Copyright 2012-2019
The Disciplined Agile Toolkit
2018 © Disciplined Agile Inc.
 The Workflow of Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT)

Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT) addresses how to apply agile and lean strategies to all aspects of Information Technology (IT)
processes. Visit http://DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/dait/ for more information.
 The Process Goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) takes a goal-driven approach (some people like to call this a capability-driven approach or even a vector-driven approach). The
purpose of this approach is to guide people through the process-related decisions that they need to make to tailor and scale agile strategies to address the context
of the situation that they face. If a team is to own their own process then they need to know what “process options” are for sale.
Copyright 2012-2019
If you would like to learn more, please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com
 Successful Agile Transformations Target People, Processes, and Tools Simultaneously

Help people to evolve to

an agile mindset, learn
new skills, and adopt more
effective collaboration
strategies Individuals
and Interactions
80-85%

Process
Tools 5-10% Adopt new practices and
Adopt new tools, adopt new 5-10% techniques at the team,
ways to use some existing tools, department, and
and abandon some existing tools organizational levels

Successful organizational improvement targets three areas simultaneously – People (individuals and interactions); process, and tools. The majority of your effort,
typically 80-85%, will be training and coaching people in the agile mindset and culture. Just as important is to evolve your existing process and tooling
infrastructure, each of which is 5-10% of your improvement effort.
Copyright 2017-2019
If you would like to learn more, please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com
 DAD’s Agile (Scrum-Based) Lifecycle

Agile

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)’s agile lifecycle, is based largely upon the Scrum lifecycle with proven governance concepts adopted from the Unified Process (UP) to make it enterprise ready. This lifecycle is
often adopted by project teams focused on developing a single release of a solution, although sometimes a team will stay together and follow it again for the next release (and the next release after that, and
so on). In many ways this lifecycle depicts how a Scrum-based project lifecycle works in an enterprise-class setting.
For detailed information please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/agile-lifecycle/

Copyright 2012-2019
 DAD’s Lean (Kanban-Based) Lifecycle

Lean

Disciplined
Disciplined Agile
Agile Delivery
Delivery (DAD)’s
(DAD)’s Lean
Lean lifecycle
lifecycle promotes
promotes lean
lean principles
principles such
such as
as minimizing
minimizing work
work in
in progress,
progress, maximizing
maximizing flow,
flow, aa continuous
continuous stream
stream ofof work
work (instead
(instead of
of fixed
fixed iterations),
iterations), and
and reducing
reducing
bottlenecks.
bottlenecks. This
This project-oriented
project-oriented lifecycle
lifecycle is
is often
often adopted
adopted by
by teams
teams who
who are
are new
new to
to agile/lean
agile/lean who
who face
face rapidly
rapidly changing
changing Stakeholder
Stakeholder needs,
needs, aa common
common issue
issue for
for teams
teams evolving
evolving (sustaining)
(sustaining) an
an existing
existing
legacy
legacy solution,
solution, and
and by
by traditional
traditional teams
teams that
that don’t
don’t want
want to
to take
take on
on the
the risk
risk of
of the
the cultural
cultural and
and process
process disruption
disruption usually
usually caused
caused by by agile
agile adoption
adoption (at
(at least
least not
not right
right away).
away).
For
For detailed
detailed information
information please
please visit
visit http://DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/lean-lifecycle/
http://DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/lean-lifecycle/

Copyright 2012-2019
 DAD’s Continuous Delivery: Agile Lifecycle

Continuous
Delivery: Agile

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)’s Continuous Delivery: Agile lifecycle is a natural progression from the DAD’s Agile lifecycle.
Teams typically evolve to this lifecycle from the Agile lifecycle, often adopting iteration lengths of one-week or less. The key
difference between this and the Agile lifecycle is that the Continuous Delivery: Agile lifecycle results in a release of new
functionality at the end of each iteration rather than after several iterations. Automation and technical practices are critical to
your success.
For detailed information please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/dad-lifecycle-continuous-delivery-agile/

Copyright 2014-2019
 DAD’s Continuous Delivery: Lean Lifecycle

Continuous
Delivery: Lean

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)’s Continuous Delivery: Lean lifecycle is a natural progression from the Lean or the Continuous
Delivery: Agile lifecycles. With this lifecycle delivery of new functionality into production is truly continuous, typically occurring
many times a day. Automation and technical practices are critical to your success.

For detailed information please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/cdlean-lifecycle/

Copyright 2014-2019
 DAD’s Exploratory (Lean Startup) Lifecycle

Exploratory

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)’s Exploratory lifecycle is based on the Lean Startup principles. The philosophy of Lean Startup is to
minimize up-front investments in developing new offerings in the marketplace in favor of small experiments. The idea is to run
some experiments with potential customers to identify what they want based in actual usage, thereby increasing our chance of
producing something they’re actually interested in. This approach of running customer-facing experiments to explore user needs is
an important design thinking strategy for exploring “wicked problems” in your domain.
For detailed information please visit http://DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/exploratory-lifecycle/

Copyright 2014-2019
 DAD’s Program (Team of Teams) Lifecycle

Program

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)’s Program lifecycle overviews how to organize a team of teams.
Large agile teams are rare in practice, but they do happen. In DAD the subteams (or squads) are
allowed to choose their own way of working (WoW), including their lifecycle.

For detailed information please visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com/lifecycle/program/

Copyright 2017-2019
 · A fully functional release of a product
that represents the smallest possible
feature set that addresses the current
needs of your customers
MMR
Minimal Marketable
Release Is a
MMP
Informs Minimal Marketable
Product

Part of
· The first release of an
Informs
MMR
· Used to shorten initial

MMF time-to-market

MVP Minimal Marketable

Feature
Minimal Viable Informs
Product
· A fully functional, single feature or
function that provides real value to
· Created to explore a hypothesis
end users
· Often a functional prototype where
· Could potentially be deployed on its
some functionality is simulated or
own
performed manually
· Your aim is to do just enough work to
get something in front of potential end
users to learn what they really want 2017 © Disciplined Agile Consortium
 How Can We Deploy a Better Product Faster?
· A fully functional release of a product
that represents the smallest possible
feature set that addresses the current
needs of your customers
MMR
Minimal Marketable
Release Is a
MMP
Minimal Marketable
Informs
Product
Part of
· The first release of an
Informs
MMR
· Used to shorten initial

MMF time-to-market

MVP Minimal Marketable

Feature
Minimal Viable Informs
Product
· A fully functional, single feature or
function that provides real value to
· Created to explore a hypothesis
end users
· Often a functional prototype where
· Could potentially be deployed on its
some functionality is simulated or
own
performed manually
· Your aim is to do just enough work to
get something in front of potential end
users to learn what they really want

For detailed information please visit http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/agility-at-scale/product-management/

 What Scaling Factors Does Your Agile Team Face?*

48% of agile teams are more than 10 Only 29% of agile teams “near located”,
people in size either working co-located in a team room or in an
open space area
Team Size
40% of agile teams work in a 250+

complex or very complex domain

100
Domain Geographic
Complexity Distribution
Chaotic 25 Global 96% of agile teams need to
Very complex Same time zone collaborate with others external to
themselves in order to succeed
Complex 10 Same building
93% of agile teams deal with Straightforward Colocated
one or more technical complexities
New stand-alone solution
Single division 17% of agile teams are working in an
New integrated solution Single company outsourcing situation
None
Legacy solution Contractors
Multi-platform legacy Outsourcing
87% of agile teams work with Technical
Process
Organizational
technical debt in some form Complexity Distribution
Financial

48% of agile teams work are Life critical 67% of agile teams face some sort of
actively paying down technical debt Compliance compliancy regime

*Source: 2016 Agility at Scale Survey, Ambysoft.com/surveys/agileAtScale2016.html

The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit provides lightweight advice for applying agile and lean strategies in enterprise-class settings in a context-sensitive manner. Please visit us at DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com
Copyright 2016-2019

#ContextCounts #DisciplinedAgile #ChoiceIsGood

 Develop
common Align with
vision enterprise
direction
Form initial
team

Explore initial
scope

Identify
risks
INCEPTION
PHASE
Identify initial
technical
strategy
Form work
environment

Develop initial
Secure release plan
funding

Disciplined agile teams invest a bit of time up

front in an Inception phase, which is sometimes
called a project initiation phase, startup phase,
sprint zero, or iteration zero. This effort is
conducted before actually starting to build a
solution. Your aim is to do just enough high-level
work to get going in the right direction, the details
will come during Construction

disciplinedagileconsortium.org
 Produce a
potentially
consumable
solution

Prove Address
architecture changing
early stakeholder
needs
CONSTRUCTION
PHASE

Improve Move closer

quality to deployable
release

Disciplined agile teams work closely with their

stakeholders throughout the Construction phase,
focusing on performing the highest value work as
defined by their stakeholders. Your aim during the
Construction phase is to produce a consumable
solution which provides business value to your
organization and which meets or exceeds the
minimum required functionality to justify the cost of
deploying it.

disciplinedagileconsortium.org
 Ensure the Deploy
solution TRANSITION the
is consumable
PHASE solution

The focus of Transition is to deploy your solution

into the hands of your stakeholders. For phased
rollouts, the Transition phase could consist of
multiple iterations. Transition should be as short as
possible, and for experienced teams the Transition
phase will evolve into an activity that lasts minutes
or hours, not days or weeks.

disciplinedagileconsortium.org
 Disciplined Agilist (DA)
Prerequisites: None
Criteria: Attend any Disciplined Agile workshop or
pay membership fee
Cost of test: Test not required
Demonstrates: A basic knowledge of Disciplined Agile (DA)
with an interest in learning more

Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA)

Prerequisites: None
Criteria: Pass CDA test
Cost of test: $200USD, free with eligible workshop*
Demonstrates: A validated understanding of DA

Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner (CDAP)

Prerequisites: CDA in good standing
Criteria: Pass CDAP test, 2+ years experience
Cost of test: $300USD
Demonstrates: Advanced DA knowledge and 2+ years
of experience
Certified Disciplined Agile Instructor (CDAI)
Prerequisites:CDAP or CDAC in good standing
Criteria: Co-teach with a DA Fellow & DAC
Review of Credentials
Fees: Annual fee plus DAC royalties
Demonstrates: Advanced DA knowledge plus teaching
ability, participant in Disciplined Agile
Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC) Community
Prerequisites: CDAP in good standing
Criteria: DAC board review
Cost: $500USD
Demonstrates: Advanced DA knowledge, 5+ years of
experience, and giveback to other agilists

*Eligible courses are indicated on course curriculum.

Copyright 2018 Disciplined Agile Consortium

DisciplinedAgileConsortium.org
 Disciplined Agile Data Warehousing (DW)/Business Intelligence (BI)
Disciplined Agile DW/BI teams take a highly collaborative, lightweight strategy to development. To do so they will take a three-phase
approach:
1. Inception – The team performs just enough work to get going in the right direction. Disciplined Agile teams will spend a few days or
perhaps a week or so to do so, not several weeks or months.
2. Construction – Disciplined agile teams incrementally build the DW/BI solution in thin, fully functional vertical slices that could be
potentially shipped into production. These slices are available every week or two.
3. Transition – The team ensures their DW/BI solution is consumable and then they ship into production.

The following diagram summarizes the primary and secondary development activities that are potentially performed by the team. Primary
activities are ones that add direct value to the development effort. Secondary activities tend to focus on long-term documentation that
may add value in the future, but the value proposition tends to be dubious in practice so you want to be very careful in how much effort you
invest in them.

There are several interesting differences in the artifacts created by a Disciplined Agile DW/BI team compared to a traditional one.
Disciplined agile teams create a high-level conceptual model early and explore the details on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. If there is a logical
data model (LDM) created, it is lightweight and evolves over time. The physical data model (PDM) evolves throughout the lifecycle as the
requirements evolve. The most important artifact created by the team is a regression test suite. This suite both validates and specifies
(when a test-first approach is taken), alleviating the need for most traditional data specifications. The team may also choose to capture
meta-data over time, but also in a lightweight manner.

Ar&fact Genera&on Within DW/BI Teams: A Comparison

Tradi&onal DW/BI

Conceptual Model

Logical Data Model

Physical Data Model

Data Source Specs

Meta Data

Database Tests
Analysis Architecture Design Development Test & Fix Deploy

Disciplined Agile DW/BI

Conceptual Model
Logical Data Model
Physical Data Model
Data Source Specs
Meta Data

Database Tests
Incep&on Construc&on Transi&on
Copyright 2012-2015 Disciplined Agile Consor8um

For more information about the Disciplined Agile process decision framework we invite you to visit DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com. For
information about Agile database techniques please visit AgileData.org. For Disciplined Agile DW/BI workshops please visit
DisciplinedAgileConsortium.org.

Copyright 2016 Disciplined Agile Consortium

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disciplinedagileconsortium.org
 OUR MISSION:

Deliver high quality solutions

early and often that delight our
stakeholders

disciplinedagileconsortium.org