A software development team, consistently missing its release targets, uses a basic Agile (Scrum) lifecycle. A diagnostic reveals that the primary bottleneck is the handoff to a separate QA team, which runs tests manually at the end of each iteration. This creates a two-week delay for every three-week iteration. As the DASSM, which lifecycle change would most directly address this value delivery impediment?
During a tense retrospective, two senior developers have a heated disagreement about architectural choices. One developer favors a microservices approach for future scalability, while the other advocates for maintaining the current monolith to reduce immediate complexity. The conflict is becoming personal and derailing the meeting. According to the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which conflict resolution style is most appropriate for the DASSM to employ in this situation to achieve a sustainable, high-quality decision?
A new team has been formed with members from different departments who have never worked together. The team is struggling to make decisions, individuals are hesitant to share opinions, and there is a general lack of trust. The DASSM recognizes these as signs of a team in the early stages of development. Which TWO actions are most critical for the DASSM to take to foster psychological safety and help the team progress? (Select TWO)
A financial services organization is adopting Disciplined Agile to improve its portfolio management process. The leadership team wants to ensure that investments are aligned with strategic objectives and that they can visualize the flow of large initiatives from conception to delivery. Which process goal in the DA toolkit is specifically designed to address these enterprise-level concerns?
A DASSM notices that a highly skilled but quiet team member rarely speaks up during planning sessions, even when they likely have valuable input. The DASSM suspects the team member's introverted nature and the dominance of more vocal members are the cause. To improve this dynamic, the DASSM decides to use a facilitation technique that allows for individual brainstorming before group discussion. Which technique is being applied?
True or False: In Disciplined Agile, the Program lifecycle is recommended for large teams of 50-100 people that need to be broken down into a team of teams, where each team focuses on a specific feature set of a larger product.
A product owner is struggling to prioritize a large backlog of features, technical debt, and bug fixes. The development team is frustrated because they feel crucial refactoring work is constantly being ignored in favor of new features, leading to a decline in system stability. Which DA process goal provides specific decision points and options for balancing these competing priorities?
A DASSM is coaching a team that is part of a larger program involving five other teams. This team frequently has its work blocked by dependencies on the 'Platform Services' team. The Platform team uses a different planning cadence and is not well-integrated into the program's agile process. Which practice would be most effective for the DASSM to facilitate between these teams to improve coordination and manage dependencies?
**Case Study** A mid-sized e-commerce company, 'ShopFast', has been using a Scrum-based approach for two years. They have four feature teams, a shared database team, and a separate operations team. While individual feature teams have stable velocity, the overall time-to-market for new features is slow, and the business is frustrated. A value stream analysis reveals significant delays during the database schema update and production deployment phases, which are managed by the database and operations teams, respectively. These teams operate with a ticket-based system and have long lead times. The feature teams complain that database changes take weeks to get approved and implemented. The operations team complains about receiving unstable builds with inadequate documentation, forcing them to reject deployments. There is a culture of blame between the teams, and morale is declining. The CTO has asked you, as the new DASSM, to propose a plan to optimize their Way of Working (WoW). Which approach represents the most effective, holistic solution based on Disciplined Agile principles?
A team is adopting the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach to improve their measurement strategy. They have established a goal: "Improve the quality of our product." According to GQM, what would be an appropriate next step?