PMI DAF key terms

A hybrid agile toolkit that lets a team choose its way of working by combining practices from agile, lean, and traditional sources, guided by principles, context, and guided continuous improvement rather than a single prescribed method.

The set of principles and promises that shape how people behave in Disciplined Agile, covering customer value, collaboration, pragmatism, choice, and continuous learning rather than a fixed process recipe.

Deliver customer value, be awesome, pragmatism, context counts, choice is good, and optimize the whole are the six guiding principles that inform decision-making across Disciplined Agile teams and organizations.

A principle stating that improvement should consider the entire value stream and organization, because local optimizations in one team or phase often damage overall flow and outcomes.

A principle recognizing that different contexts call for different practices, so teams should be empowered to select from a range of proven options rather than follow one mandated process.

A principle stating that no single way of working fits every situation; team size, culture, risk, regulation, and technology all influence which practices are appropriate.

A principle favoring what actually works in a given situation over theoretical purity, encouraging teams to adapt practices to deliver value rather than follow dogma.

A structured approach in which teams use DA guidance to identify improvement opportunities, choose practices, measure results, and share lessons, improving both their way of working and their outcomes over time.

The tailored combination of roles, practices, ceremonies, and tools a team uses to deliver value, which evolves through guided continuous improvement as context and learning change.

An approach that deliberately blends practices from multiple sources, such as Scrum ceremonies with Kanban flow and lean governance, to fit an organization's real constraints and needs.

In Disciplined Agile, a high-level delivery pattern such as agile, continuous delivery, lean, or exploratory that describes how work moves from idea to release and guides practice selection.

A delivery life cycle organized around short, timeboxed iterations that produce a potentially shippable increment each time, suited to teams facing evolving requirements and moderate delivery cadence.

A delivery life cycle in which work flows continuously and is released frequently, often automatically, to production, requiring strong automation, testing, and deployment discipline.

A delivery life cycle that emphasizes flow efficiency, limiting work in progress, and pulling work as capacity allows, often used where demand is steady and predictability matters more than rapid change.

A delivery life cycle used for research-heavy or uncertain work such as proofs of concept, where learning and experimentation dominate and formal release may never occur.

An agile framework using fixed-length sprints, defined roles, and artifacts such as product backlog and increment; in Disciplined Agile it is one option within a broader toolkit rather than the default.

A flow-based method that visualizes work on a board, limits work in progress, and manages throughput using explicit policies and measurement, often layered onto an existing process.

A cap on how many items may be in a given workflow state at once, used to reduce multitasking, expose bottlenecks, and improve flow and cycle time.

The ratio of time work spends actively being worked on versus total elapsed time in the process, highlighting delays and queue time that reduce throughput.

The elapsed time from when work starts on an item until it is completed, a common flow metric used to forecast delivery and identify process delays.

The total elapsed time from when a request is made or accepted until it is delivered to the customer, including waiting and queue time before work begins.

An ordered list of work items such as features, defects, and improvements that a team draws from to plan and deliver value; ordering reflects priority, risk, and value.

A fixed-length iteration in Scrum, typically two to four weeks, during which a team builds a usable increment; other DA life cycles may use iterations without calling them sprints.

A timeboxed period of work that ends with a usable increment of a product or service, providing a regular cadence for planning, delivery, review, and reflection.

A regular team reflection where members inspect how they worked, identify improvements, and agree on actions, serving as a primary vehicle for guided continuous improvement.

The sequence of activities an organization performs to deliver a product or service to a customer, analyzed end to end to find waste, delays, and improvement opportunities.

A culture and set of practices that integrate development and operations to shorten delivery time, improve reliability, and enable frequent, low-risk releases through automation and shared ownership.

A practice where developers merge code into a shared mainline frequently, with automated builds and tests verifying each change to detect integration problems early.

A short, timeboxed investigation used to reduce uncertainty or answer a technical question before committing to delivery work, common in exploratory and agile life cycles.

The role accountable for maximizing product value by managing and ordering the backlog and representing stakeholder needs; DA tailors responsibilities to context and may share or extend them.

A Disciplined Agile role responsible for guiding the team, removing impediments, and fostering a healthy way of working, blending aspects of coaching, facilitation, and servant leadership.

A role focused on helping a team apply Scrum effectively by coaching, facilitating ceremonies, and removing impediments; in Disciplined Agile this responsibility may be distributed or combined with others.

A Disciplined Agile role accountable for the architecture and technical direction of a solution, ensuring design decisions support current delivery and long-term evolvability.

The core roles in Disciplined Agile that exist on most teams, including Product Owner, Team Lead, Team Member, Architecture Owner, and stakeholder, each with defined responsibilities.

Any person or group with an interest in the outcome of the work, such as customers, sponsors, regulators, or support staff, whose needs inform priorities and acceptance criteria.

An agreed checklist of criteria that work must satisfy to be considered complete, promoting shared quality expectations and preventing partially finished work from being counted as done.

A Disciplined Agile phase in which a team is formed, goals are clarified, initial architecture and plans are considered, and the way of working is tailored before delivery begins.

The Disciplined Agile phase in which the team builds and tests the solution incrementally, producing potentially consumable increments while adapting plans as learning occurs.

The Disciplined Agile phase in which the solution is released to its operational environment, validated, and handed over or supported, including deployment and readiness activities.

A Disciplined Agile concept describing a cohesive area of process guidance, such as team management or product management, that teams can adopt and tailor independently.