PMI DASSM Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) Exam Exam Practice Test

In the context of roles in Disciplined Agile (DA), it is true that a person may take on more than one role within a team. DA promotes flexibility and adaptability in team roles, allowing team members to wear multiple hats depending on their skills and the team's needs. Option A (highly specialized team members) contradicts DA’s principle of cross-functional teams. Option C incorrectly assigns the facilitator role to the Product Owner, and Option D does not accurately describe the Team Lead's responsibilities in DA.

The process goal of "Explore Scope" in the Disciplined Agile framework focuses on understanding the purpose, domain, and intended usage of a product. This involves clarifying what needs to be delivered, gathering requirements, and determining the boundaries of what is in and out of scope for the product development. When a team is exploring the product's purpose, domain, and usage, they are actively engaging in the process of defining and refining the scope of the work to be done, making Option C the correct answer. Options A, B, and D relate to other aspects of agile project management, but do not specifically address the exploration of scope.

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.

The "Exploratory" lifecycle in Disciplined Agile (DA) is most suitable for a lean startup model that focuses on quickly validating ideas and narrowing down candidate projects to pursue. The Exploratory lifecycle is designed for situations where the primary goal is to learn and validate assumptions rapidly through experimentation and feedback. This aligns with the lean startup approach of testing hypotheses, iterating quickly, and adapting based on validated learning. Options A (Continuous delivery Agile), B (Agile), D (Lean), E (Continuous Delivery Lean), and F (Program) do not focus specifically on the rapid learning and experimentation phase that characterizes the lean startup model.

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.

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.

The principle "Be awesome" in Disciplined Agile emphasizes creating an environment where people are motivated, work well together, and support each other in achieving common goals. When a team lead works hard to foster collaboration and unity within the team, they are applying the "Be awesome" principle by creating a positive, effective, and high-performing team dynamic. Options B (Choice is good), C (Context counts), D (Optimize around products/services), and E (Delight customers) do not specifically relate to the emphasis on fostering teamwork and an awesome team environment.

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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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If the frequency of changes to requirements is very high (almost daily), the Continuous Delivery Agile lifecycle model makes the most sense. This model is designed to handle frequent changes by integrating and delivering work continuously, ensuring that new requirements are incorporated quickly and effectively. Options A (Scrum) and D (Agile) provide iterative approaches, but they may not handle daily changes as efficiently as a continuous delivery model. Option B (Lean) focuses on optimizing flow and reducing waste but does not specifically address handling frequent requirement changes.

Disciplined Agile (DA) milestones are based on Lean governance principles. Lean governance emphasizes lightweight control mechanisms and focuses on achieving desired outcomes rather than enforcing compliance through heavy documentation or bureaucratic processes. DA milestones are established to ensure that value is being delivered efficiently and effectively throughout the lifecycle, with decisions made based on evidence and validated learning rather than detailed documentation (A) or strict adherence to lifecycle stages (D). While continuous integration (C) can support Lean governance by providing frequent, actionable insights into product development, it is not the foundation upon which DA milestones are based.

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.

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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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.

The eight principles of Disciplined Agile are:

Delight Customers: Focus on providing exceptional value to customers.

Be Awesome: Foster an environment where team members feel motivated and supported.

Pragmatism: Make practical decisions based on context, rather than blindly following a methodology.

Context Counts: Recognize that every team and organization operates in a unique context.

Choice is Good: Encourage flexibility by providing multiple options to solve problems.

Optimize Flow: Improve efficiency and effectiveness by focusing on smooth workflow.

Enterprise Awareness: Ensure alignment with organizational goals and strategies.

Organize Around Products/Services: Form teams based on delivering complete products or services, rather than around specialized functions.

These principles promote a flexible, customer-centric, and context-sensitive approach to Agile delivery.

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 Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset consists of several principles that guide agile practices within an organization. Three of these key principles are:

Delight customers:This principle emphasizes that the primary goal is to meet or exceed customer expectations by delivering value early and often.

Enterprise awareness:This principle promotes awareness of the larger organizational context, encouraging teams to make decisions that align with enterprise goals, values, and governance.

Be pragmatic:This principle encourages practical, context-specific solutions over rigid adherence to one methodology, allowing teams to use practices that are most effective for their situation.

Option B, "Be a servant leader," is a practice or behavior expected from team leaders, not a core principle of the DA mindset itself. Option D, "Accelerate delivery," is an outcome of effective agile practices, but not one of the principles guiding the DA approach.

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.

DevOps in the Disciplined Agile framework refers to a set of practices and tools aimed at creating a seamless integration of development and operations to enable continuous delivery and integration. Option (B), "Creating a smooth flow of work from development to operations," correctly captures the essence of DevOps. This practice involves automating workflows, improving collaboration between development and operations teams, and ensuring that software changes can be deployed to production reliably and frequently.

Options A, C, and D do not fully encompass the concept of DevOps in the Disciplined Agile context. While automating testing (A) and involving operational teams in development (C) are parts of DevOps, they are not the complete definition. Using development team members to solve operational problems (D) is not the primary focus of DevOps; instead, the aim is to create a collaborative environment where both development and operations teams work together effectively.

Thus, the correct answer is (B) as it represents the overarching goal of DevOps in a DA context, which is to facilitate a smooth, efficient flow from development to operations, enabling rapid and reliable software delivery.

The Kaizen feedback loop, which is an important concept in Lean and Agile practices, can be summarized as "Plan, Do, Study, Act" (PDSA). This cycle is fundamental to continuous improvement (Kaizen) and is used to iteratively improve processes and products. "Plan" involves identifying a goal or a change to implement; "Do" means implementing the change; "Study" refers to analyzing the results and understanding the impact of the change; and "Act" is about making necessary adjustments or standardizing the change if it is successful. Options A, B, and C do not accurately reflect the PDSA cycle as recognized in Disciplined Agile and Lean methodologies.

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 primary advantage of working in an Agile team, according to the PMI Disciplined Agile framework, is the ability to quickly adapt to changing customer needs (Option C). Agile teams emphasize flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous improvement, enabling them to respond effectively to feedback and evolving requirements. Options A, B, and D do not reflect the core value proposition of Agile. While agile teams may aim for timely delivery, specialization, andreduced customer intervention, their core strength lies in adaptability and responsiveness to change, ensuring that the product remains aligned with customer needs.

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The principle of "Delight customers" in the Disciplined Agile framework encourages teams to exceed customer expectations rather than just meet them. This approach aims to provide exceptional value and experiences that surprise and please customers, thereby fostering loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. Simply meeting expectations is not sufficient to truly "delight" customers; therefore, the statement that delighting customers means just about meeting their expectations is false.

Avalue streamin Disciplined Agile and Lean thinking is defined as the sequence of steps that an organization undertakes to deliver a product or service to customers. This encompasses all activities, from identifying customer needs to delivering the final product or service, and includes both value-adding and non-value-adding activities. The goal of managing a value stream is to optimize the flow of value to the customer by identifying and eliminating waste, improving efficiency, and enhancing overall effectiveness.

The least suitable way to adopt Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is touse any of the prescribed methods and follow to the letter. DAD emphasizes flexibility and the need to adapt practices to the specific context of the team or organization. Blindly following a method without considering the unique needs, challenges, and goals of the team contradicts the adaptive and context-sensitive nature of Disciplined Agile. Options B, C, and D (taking advice from "Choose Your WoW", starting with DAD, or working with an experienced coach) are all suitable ways to adopt DAD, as they involve guidance, adaptation, and learning.

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 Disciplined Agile (DA), an Epic is a large user story that represents a significant piece of work that usually requires substantial effort and may span multiple iterations or sprints to complete. Epics are often too large to be completed in a single iteration and are typically broken down into smaller, more manageable user stories. Option A (a collection of smaller user stories) is partially correct because epics are often decomposed into smaller user stories, but option B provides a more precise definition as it emphasizes the size and effort required for completion. Options C and D are not correct in the DA context; they describe different types of analysis tools or techniques.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, "process blades" represent different areas of an organization's processes that need to be addressed for effective agile implementation. The process blades are grouped into three primary categories:

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD):This category focuses on end-to-end delivery processes that bring a product or solution from idea to implementation, incorporating agile and lean approaches.

Disciplined DevOps:This category deals with practices that facilitate efficient development and operations, ensuring continuous delivery, integration, and deployment of software.

Disciplined Project Management Office (PMO):This process blade relates to the governance and oversight of agile initiatives, aligning them with organizational strategies and goals.

These categories provide a structured way to organize process-related activities and ensure a holistic approach to agile adoption, covering various facets from development to operations and governance.References:

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

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

The desire of senior management to evolve an organization to be more responsive to changes in the marketplace or environment is best captured by the concept ofBusiness Agility. Business agility refers to the ability of an organization to adapt quickly and effectively to market changes, customer demands, and emerging opportunities, all while maintaining a focus on delivering value. Disciplined Agile promotes business agility by providing a toolkit that helps organizations navigate their unique challenges and choose the best practices to enhance responsiveness and adaptability across all levels of the organization.

The main role of the team lead (which can be referred to as a Scrum Master, Team Coach, or Team Lead in Disciplined Agile) is to ensure that the team is building the product in the right way. This involves facilitating the team's process, removing impediments, and coaching them to adopt and optimize Agile practices, ensuring quality and efficiency in delivery. The team lead does not dictate what product to build (which is the role of the Product Owner), nor is their primary role to build the product themselves or coordinate building efforts in a command-and-control manner. Instead, they focus on enabling and empowering the team to deliver high-quality work in alignment with Agile principles.

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.

A well-written user story in the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework describes the product requirements from the customer's perspective. In DA, a user story is a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, typically a user or customer of the system. The primary purpose of a user story is to articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer.

A user story should focus on what the customer needs and wants, rather than a fixed outcome (A), the needs of all users (B), or merely the expectations of the product owner (C). It shouldcapture the customer's perspective (D) to ensure the team understands who the end-user is, what they need, and why they need it. This customer-centric approach helps the team create value-driven features and maintain alignment with customer expectations.

Disciplined Agile emphasizes that user stories are part of a collaborative conversation with the stakeholders, which allows the team to explore and understand the customers' needs effectively. The DA framework encourages iterative development based on customer feedback, ensuring that each user story is aligned with delivering maximum customer value.

In a Disciplined Agile team, the role of the team lead is not typically to make decisions on product priorities or the product roadmap. These responsibilities usually belong to the Product Owner, who represents the customer and stakeholders, prioritizes the backlog, and defines the product vision. The team lead's responsibilities include guiding the team through improvement actions (A), facilitating collaboration (B), and helping the team evolve their Way of Working (WoW) (D). Hence, "C. Providing timely decisions on priority and product roadmap" is not a role for the team lead.

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.

The PMI Disciplined Agile framework presents various process choices in a goal diagram to allow teams to select the most appropriate practices for their context. However, not all choices are suitable for every situation. The goal diagram illustrates multiple options to provide flexibility, but teams need to assess their specific circumstances, constraints, and goals to determine which process choices are viable. Therefore, it is true that not all process choices may be viable in a given situation.

Disciplined Agile (DA) is described as a process-decision toolkit that provides tailored guidance to help teams and organizations optimize their way of working in a context-sensitive manner. Unlike a rigid methodology, DA offers flexibility by allowing teams to choose from a variety of agile, lean, and traditional practices that best fit their situation. DA emphasizes that there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach; rather, it empowers teams to make informed decisions based on their specific needs and circumstances. Option A focuses on project alignment, which is only one aspect of DA. Options C and D do not accurately reflect the comprehensive, adaptive nature of DA as a toolkit designed for broad applicability.

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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 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.

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.

Among the four views that describe Disciplined Agile (DA),Practicesare best represented asgoal diagrams. DA goal diagrams visually depict the process goals and decision points that teams can navigate to choose the best way of working (WoW) in their specific context. These diagrams provide guidance on options, techniques, and strategies for achieving different agile and lean practices.

Options B (Lifecycle models), C (Principles and guidelines), D (Roles and responsibilities), E (Team structures), and F (Workflows) describe other aspects of DA but do not specifically represent 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.

In Disciplined Agile, limiting work-in-progress (WIP) is crucial to optimizing flow within a team. By reducing the number of tasks being worked on at any given time, teams are better able to focus on completing a smaller set of high-priority items, which reduces context switching and increases efficiency. This focus leads to faster delivery of high-quality work. Options like "A. Pursue multiple goals at a time" and "C. Preventing priority changes" are contrary to the benefits of limiting WIP, and "D. Respect the timebox" is less relevant in the context of optimizing flow. Thus, "B. Create focus" is the correct answer.

In Disciplined Agile, the "Construction" phase is where a consumable solution is developed incrementally and collaboratively. This phase is focused on creating working software or products in small, manageable increments, incorporating feedback, and ensuring that the solution evolves to meet customer needs. The Construction phase emphasizes collaboration, incremental development, and continuous integration to build a high-quality product iteratively.

Options A (Execution) and D (Transition) do not accurately describe the phase focused on collaborative and incremental solution development. Option B (Inception) refers to the initial phase where the scope, vision, and feasibility of the project are established.

References:

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

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

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.

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 best way to eliminate waste in Disciplined Agile is to "eliminate delays in workflow and feedback." Lean principles focus on removing any non-value-added activities (waste) to improve efficiency. By minimizing delays, teams can ensure a smoother flow of work and faster feedback loops, which helps to identify and resolve issues quickly and reduces the time taken to deliver value to customers. While making sure each step is done as quickly as possible (A) or correctly(D) and ensuring people know their job (B) are important, they are not the primary method of eliminating waste according to Lean principles.

Attributes of a leader in Disciplined Agile include taking risks, inspiring trust, and focusing on goals. Leaders in an agile environment should be willing to take calculated risks to innovate and improve, build trust within their teams and with stakeholders, and maintain a focus on achieving goals and delivering value. Options B (Goes with the flow) and D (Assigns tasks) are less aligned with agile leadership, which emphasizes empowerment over task assignment and adaptability rather than passively following along.

TheProduct Backlogis the artifact that collects all the work flowing to the team in Agile practices, including Disciplined Agile (DA). It is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product, serving as the single source of work undertaken by the team. This backlog includes user stories, features, enhancements, bug fixes, and technical tasks. It is prioritized by the Product Owner to ensure that the team works on the most valuable items first.

Options B (Business backlog) is not a standard Agile artifact. Option C (Iteration backlog) is a subset of the Product Backlog, containing items chosen for the current iteration. Option D (Release roadmap) is a higher-level plan for future releases, not a collection of all work items.

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 Delivery (DAD) defines a delivery life cycle consisting of three phases: Inception, Construction, and Transition. Inception focuses on initial project planning, stakeholder alignment, and getting the team ready to work. Construction is the phase where the team builds the solution in iterations, delivering incremental value. Transition involves preparing the solutionfor release, including final testing, deployment, and user training. The other options (A, B, C) do not accurately reflect the terminology and phases used in the DAD life cycle.

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.

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.

Transparency is a core practice in Disciplined Agile to ensure that all stakeholders, including team members and customers, have a clear understanding of the project's progress and any challenges faced. The reasons for practicing transparency include ensuring everyone knows what is happening (A), improving team morale (B), and meeting customer expectations (D). Delaying bad news to customers contradicts the principle of transparency. Hence, "C. It delays breaking bad news to customers" is not a reason that Disciplined Agile teams practice transparency.

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.

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.

The primary function of the "Business Operations" process blade in Disciplined Agile is to provide ongoing support and services to customers and ensure that products function smoothly post-deployment. This involves managing customer relationships, handling support requests, andmaintaining operational stability. Options such as "B. To monitor the competitive landscape" and "D. To ensure cash flow in the organization" do not align with the core function of Business Operations. "C. To monitor and guide teams to remove barriers" is more aligned with the roles of leadership and governance. Hence, "A. To provide services to customers and support your products" is the correct answer.

"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.

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 "Team Estimation" technique, you know you are finished estimating user stories whenthere are no more user stories left to estimate, and no team member wishes to move a card. This method relies on a collaborative, consensus-based approach where team members discuss and move cards (representing user stories) until everyone agrees on their relative sizes or effort. Onceall user stories are estimated and no further adjustments are proposed, the estimation process is considered complete. Time spent or product owner involvement is secondary to achieving team consensus on the estimates.

For an Agile or Lean project team, the aim of the Transition phase is to ensure that the solution is ready to be released to stakeholders and then appropriately manage its release. The Transitionphase involves finalizing the work, preparing for deployment, and ensuring that all aspects of the solution meet the necessary quality standards for delivery. While testing (A), communicating the release (B), and applying continuous deployment practices (C) are important activities, the primary aim of the Transition phase is to make sure that the solution is ready for release and to handle the release effectively.

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.

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.

Estimating in hours instead of pointsmay not help in improving predictabilitybecause time-based estimates can often be inaccurate and can vary widely based on individual productivity and context. Using story points allows teams to focus on relative size and complexity, making it easier to compare work items and plan iterations more predictably.

Options B (reducing technical debt), C (reducing feedback cycles), D (respecting WIP limits), and E (adopting a test-first approach) all contribute to improving predictability by promoting consistent, high-quality delivery.

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 Disciplined Agile,shared services teamsare not always based on specialization. While shared services teams often consist of specialists (e.g., security experts, database administrators), they can also be cross-functional teams that provide support across different disciplines. The key is that these teams provide services to multiple delivery teams, regardless of whether they are composed entirely of specialists.

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.