PMI DAF flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Disciplined Agile (DA)

A hybrid, context-driven toolkit of practices with goal diagrams for making explicit, trade-off-based choices; it covers the full delivery life cycle and scales to the enterprise.

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

The team-level layer of DA covering inception, construction, transition, production, and retirement, with roles such as Team Lead, Product Owner, Architecture Owner, and Team Member.

Way of Working (WoW)

The tailored combination of practices a specific team follows, chosen from the DA toolkit based on its context and recorded rationale, and revised through guided continuous improvement.

Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI)

The retrospective-driven improvement loop: identify a problem, evaluate options on the relevant goal diagram, make an explicit choice, then measure and adjust incrementally.

Goal Diagram

A DA decision aid that states a goal, lists its decision points, and presents options with trade-offs (advantages, disadvantages, when to use) to support explicit tailoring.

Community of Practice (CoP)

A group of practitioners across teams who share and evolve guidance for a functional area, providing guardrails and practice evolution without imposing mandates.

Scaling Factors

Context variables that drive WoW choices: team size, geographic distribution, domain complexity, technical complexity, organizational distribution, compliance requirements, enterprise discipline, and solution type.

Pragmatism Beats Purity

A DA guiding principle: choose the practice that works in the team's context, even if it is not ideologically pure agile or pure waterfall; outcomes matter more than ideology.

Agile Life Cycle

A DA life cycle for continuous delivery of consumable solutions through short iterations, suited to well-understood solutions where cadence-based delivery fits the context.

Lean Life Cycle

A DA life cycle using continuous flow with a kanban system and WIP limits, suited when work arrives continuously and the team wants to optimize cycle time.

Continuous Delivery Life Cycle

A DA life cycle that adds automated testing and deployment pipelines to agile or lean delivery, suited when frequent low-risk releases and DevOps integration are priorities.

Exploratory Life Cycle

A DA life cycle for high-uncertainty, lean-startup-style work, where experiments and MVP releases inform pivot-or-persevere decisions and funding is released in small increments.

Inception Phase

The DAD phase that establishes vision, initial scope, initial architecture, initial plan, and funding to a depth proportional to the initiative's risk and uncertainty.

Construction Phase

The DAD phase that produces a potentially consumable solution incrementally through iterations or flow, with continuous testing, integration, and demonstration of value.

Transition Phase

The DAD phase that deploys the solution into production or stakeholder hands, covering deployment readiness, stakeholder acceptance, and operational readiness.

Production Phase

The DAD phase that operates and supports the solution in production, monitoring, fixing, and evolving it, with operational feedback feeding back into the backlog.

Retirement Phase

The DAD phase that decommissions a solution in an orderly way, migrating data and users and archiving evidence for compliance, rather than neglecting it.

Ideation Phase

The pre-inception phase in which potential initiatives are identified, evaluated for value and risk, and funded or rejected as the portfolio entry point.

Team Lead Role

The DAD primary role of servant-leader and coach: removes impediments, facilitates ceremonies, and shields the team, with broader coaching scope than a Scrum Master.

Product Owner Role

The DAD primary role that owns the product vision, prioritizes the backlog, and represents stakeholder and customer value, sometimes supported by a Product Manager.

Architecture Owner Role

The DAD primary role accountable for architecture decisions and technical direction, ensuring technical risk and non-functional requirements are addressed; often a senior developer or architect.

Team Member Role

The DAD primary role of the cross-functional contributor who does the work; DAD assumes generalizing specialists who are deep in one area and able to work across boundaries.

Generalizing Specialist

A DA concept describing team members with a deep specialty plus working knowledge of adjacent areas, enabling swarming and reducing bottlenecks compared with narrow specialists.

Potentially Consumable Solution

A DAD requirement that each increment be usable by stakeholders (deployed or deployable), which is stronger than merely potentially shippable code.

Minimum Business Increment (MBI)

The smallest increment that delivers value to the business and can be released; DA uses MBIs to plan releases that are valuable, not just technically shippable.

Disciplined DevOps

The DA layer that integrates development with operations, security, and support, treating continuous integration, continuous deployment, and operational monitoring as first-class goals.

Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT)

The DA layer applying the toolkit across the IT organization, covering process blades such as portfolio management, enterprise architecture, data management, and IT governance.

Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE)

The DA layer applying the toolkit to the whole business to achieve business agility: the organization's ability to sense and respond to change, not just IT agility.

Process Blade

A DA organizing device in DAIT and DAE: a cohesive area of guidance such as continuous integration, release management, security, or data management that teams pull from as needed.

Guardrails vs Mandates

Guardrails define boundaries and principles within which teams tailor their WoW; mandates prescribe specific practices. DA prefers guardrails plus team choice over mandates.

Explicit Choice

The DA practice of recording the rationale for WoW decisions so they can be reviewed and revised; implicit choices are harder to improve through GCI.

Spike

A time-boxed investigation to reduce technical or domain uncertainty before committing to a solution approach, commonly used in inception and construction phases.