DAF Flashcards — Free Disciplined Agile Foundations (DAF, PMI-authorized, replaces the retired DASM) (DAF) Study Cards

To help teams tailor their WoW

The Disciplined Agile toolkit is designed to help teams tailor their Way of Working (WoW) to fit their unique context. It provides a comprehensive set of process goals, practices, and strategies that teams can mix and match to create a customized approach. The primary purpose is to guide teams in making informed choices rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all method.

It allows for early detection and correction of errors

The iterative approach focuses on risk reduction and feedback through smaller, frequent releases.

Analyze your team's context factors and select the option that best addresses your current challenges.

DA's process goals are deliberately populated with multiple viable options, and the toolkit does not prescribe which to use. The correct approach is to evaluate the team's specific context factors — such as team size, distribution, regulatory constraints, customer availability, and technical complexity — and select the option whose trade-offs best address the team's current challenges. This is the essence of 'choose your WoW': decisions are context-driven, not popularity-driven or effort-minimizing.

To minimize the opportunity for information loss and waiting.

In Lean, handoffs between specialized teams are a form of waste (specifically, waiting and defects from miscommunication). Each handoff introduces a queue, a transfer of tacit knowledge, and an opportunity for requirements or context to be lost. Reducing handoffs directly shrinks the opportunity for information loss and idle waiting time, which shortens lead time and improves flow.

Different teams have different contexts, and a single process would be suboptimal for most.

DA is built on the principle that there is no single 'best' process — the best process is the one that fits a team's specific context. Different teams face different constraints: team size, geographic distribution, regulatory compliance, technical debt, customer availability, and organizational culture. Standardizing all teams on one process would force many teams into practices that are suboptimal or even counterproductive for their situation, undermining the very adaptability DA is designed to enable. DA therefore recommends each team 'choose their WoW' and then consciously evolve it.

Use a regular coordination meeting

DA recommends lightweight, regular coordination mechanisms — such as coordination meetings, scrum of scrums, or communities of practice — to align multiple teams without imposing rigid uniformity. A regular coordination meeting is the canonical DA approach for cross-team alignment. It preserves team autonomy while ensuring dependencies and integration points are managed.

Make it visible and plan for remediation

DA encourages managing technical debt through explicit visibility and planned remediation within the process goals.

Assess the current team maturity and context

According to Disciplined Agile, the first step when scaling agile efforts is to assess the current team maturity and context. DA emphasizes that scaling is not a one-size-fits-all journey; you must understand where the team is now (their skills, culture, constraints) before choosing a scaling approach. This aligns with DA's principle of 'Context Counts' and its guided continuous improvement approach.

Actively engage them throughout the process

Best practice in Disciplined Agile (DA) is to actively engage stakeholders throughout the entire lifecycle, not just at the beginning or end. Continuous engagement ensures requirements stay aligned with real needs, feedback is incorporated early, and surprises at delivery are avoided. DA's principle of 'delighting customers' and its emphasis on collaboration make ongoing stakeholder involvement a core practice.

Choose a lifecycle that fits the specific needs of the teams

Disciplined Agile (DA) suggests that scaling Agile is not about adopting a single framework for all teams, but rather about choosing a lifecycle — such as Agile, Lean, Continuous Delivery, Program, or Hybrid — that fits the specific needs and context of the teams involved. This reflects DA's 'Choice is Good' principle and its recognition that different teams require different approaches.

To improve the team's way of working

Retrospectives are for team reflection and process improvement.

Coordinate Activities.

For geographically distributed teams, the process goal 'Coordinate Activities' is directly concerned with ensuring that work is aligned and synchronized across locations. This goal addresses the challenges of communication, handoffs, and dependency management that are exacerbated by distance and time zones. Examining this goal helps the team select practices that enable effective collaboration despite physical separation.

Implement the 'Improve Team Productivity' process goal by identifying and removing the specific constraint causing the delay.

In Disciplined Agile, when a workflow has a bottleneck (like QA), the team should apply the 'Improve Team Productivity' process goal, which explicitly includes identifying and removing constraints using lean/Theory of Constraints thinking. The QA stage is the constraint; the correct action is to find and eliminate it (e.g., automate tests, cross-train, shift-left quality) rather than optimize elsewhere. This aligns with DA's guidance to address the system constraint, not symptoms.

Consult the DA toolkit to identify alternative practices that better fit their current situation.

Disciplined Agile is explicitly a toolkit of options, not a fixed method: when a chosen practice stops delivering value, the team is expected to revisit the relevant decision point and select a different practice from the toolkit that better fits its current context. This is the essence of 'choose your WoW' combined with guided continuous improvement — the toolkit is the source of alternatives, and the team owns the choice.

Explore Initial Scope

In Disciplined Agile, the Explore Initial Scope process goal is concerned with defining the initial work to be done — understanding the problem space, identifying the initial backlog or work items, and establishing a high-level view of what the team will deliver. It is one of the early process goals in the Inception phase and directly addresses the question of what work is in scope at the outset.

Increase the frequency of stakeholder feedback loops

Scope creep from unclear requirements is best addressed by tightening and increasing feedback loops with stakeholders so requirements are clarified iteratively and misunderstandings surface early. DA favours frequent, lightweight stakeholder collaboration over documentation-heavy or scope-freezing approaches. This aligns with DA's principle of delighting customers through continuous engagement.

Choice is Good

'Choice is Good' is one of the foundational DA principles, reflecting the philosophy that teams should be empowered to select the practices, lifecycles, and tools that fit their context. It underpins the entire DA toolkit approach, where multiple options are presented rather than a single prescribed method. This principle distinguishes DA from prescriptive frameworks.

Way of Working

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, 'WoW' is the acronym for 'Way of Working.' This term captures the unique combination of principles, practices, and processes that a given team adopts to deliver value in its specific context. DA deliberately uses 'WoW' rather than a fixed methodology because it recognizes that no two teams face identical constraints, so each team's WoW will differ.

Incorporate code review into the 'In Progress' workflow state.

The team should pull the review into their workflow, making it a collaborative, immediate step rather than an external dependency.

Context counts.

'Context counts' is one of the foundational Disciplined Agile principles: the right way of working depends on the situation — team size, culture, regulatory environment, product complexity, and customer needs. Rather than dogmatically choosing Scrum or Lean, the coach should guide the team to fit the method to their context using DA's goal-driven, choice-based approach. This is the essence of DA's 'choice is good' philosophy.

Building quality in through practices like TDD and automated testing.

Lean addresses rework by preventing defects at the point of creation rather than detecting them later. Building quality in through Test-Driven Development (TDD) and automated testing shifts verification left, so defects never enter the codebase in the first place. This eliminates the root cause of rework — defective work products flowing downstream — instead of merely measuring or containing it.