Disciplined agile delivery

Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) is the software development portion of the disciplined agile toolkit. DAD enables teams to make simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DAD builds on the many practices espoused by advocates of agile software development, including scrum, agile modeling, lean software development, and others.

The primary reference for disciplined agile delivery is the book Choose Your WoW!, written by Scott Ambler and Mark Lines.

In particular, DAD has been identified as a means of moving beyond scrum. According to Cutter Senior Consultant Bhuvan Unhelkar, "DAD provides a carefully constructed mechanism that not only streamlines IT work, but more importantly, enables scaling." Paul Gorans and Philippe Kruchten call for more discipline in implementation of agile approaches and indicate that DAD, as an example framework, is "a hybrid agile approach to enterprise IT solution delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale."

History

"DAD is a second-generation framework that strives to provide a coherent, end-to-end strategy for how agile solution delivery works in practice. DAD is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery. It has a risk-value lifecycle, is goal-driven, is scalable, and is enterprise aware."

Scott Ambler, as chief methodologist for IT at IBM Rational (mid-2006 to mid-2012), and Mark Lines initially led the development of DAD. Ambler and Lines continue to lead the evolution of DAD. DAD was developed to provide a more cohesive approach to agile software development; one that fills in the process gaps that are (purposely) ignored by Scrum, and one that is capable of enterprise-level scale. According to Ambler, "Many agile methodologies—including Scrum, XP, AM, Agile Data, Kanban, and more—focus on a subset of the activities required to deliver a solution from project initiation to delivery. Before DAD was developed, you needed to cobble together your own agile methodology to get the job done."

DAD was developed as a result of observing common patterns where agility was applied at scale successfully. It reflects the experiences of people working in the field with various customer organizations, applying agile and lean strategies internally within existing enterprise-class organizations. "[DAD] recognizes not only the importance of networks of cross-functional teams, it also explicitly offers support for scaling key practices across complex working environments using techniques that link software development efforts into robust software delivery contexts".

In 2015 the disciplined agile (DA) framework, later to become the disciplined agile toolkit, was developed. This was called disciplined agile 2.x. DAD formed the foundation for DA. A second layer, disciplined DevOps, was added as was a third layer called disciplined agile IT (DAIT). These layers, respectively, addressed how to address DevOps and IT processes in an enterprise-class setting.

Disciplined agile 3.x was released in August 2017 to introduce a fourth layer, disciplined agile enterprise (DAE), to address the full process range required for business agility.

In December 2018, disciplined agile 4, now referred to as the disciplined agile toolkit, was released. It focused on a completely revamped description of DAD and a team-based improvement strategy called guided continuous improvement (GCI).

Key aspects

People-first

Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) identifies that "People, and the way they interact with each other, are the primary determinant of success for a solution delivery project."

DAD specifies a robust set of primary and secondary roles, outlined in the roles section below.

Learning-oriented

DAD promotes the ideas that team members should collaborate closely and learn from each other, that the team should invest effort to learn from their experiences and evolve their approach, and that individuals should do so as well.

Hybrid

Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) adopts and tailors proven strategies from existing methods such as scrum, extreme programming (XP), agile modeling (AM), Unified Process (UP), Kanban, outside-in software development, and agile data (AD). Rather than taking the time to adapt one of these existing frameworks, with DAD all of the effort of combining relevant pieces of each technique has already been done.

Full delivery lifecycle

Unlike first generation agile methods that typically focus on the construction aspects of the lifecycle, the DAD lifecycle addresses the entire project from the point of initiation all the way to production and post-delivery production activities.

Process goal driven

The approach is goal-driven rather than prescriptive. Compared to scrum, which prescribes that all work is managed via a product backlog queue, DAD suggests choosing a work-prioritization strategy based on whatever factors are most important to project stakeholders.

In a DAD approach, strategies could be driven by several factors: business value, risk, due date, dependencies, or any combination thereof. DAD describes the tradeoffs associated with each strategy and discusses the viability of each.

Solution focused

Disciplined agile delivery matures focus from simply producing software to providing consumable solutions that provide real business value to stakeholders. While software is clearly an important part of the deliverable, being solution focused means taking a holistic view of the overall problem. This can lead to suggested updates in hardware, business and organizational processes, and overall organizational structures.

Risk-value lifecycle

The DAD lifecycle is risk and value driven. It extends scrum's value-driven lifecycle, which produces potentially shippable software each sprint or iteration, so that it explicitly includes light-weight milestones such as; ensuring stakeholder consensus as to the scope of the project early in the lifecycle, proving the architecture with working code early in the lifecycle, ensuring sufficient functionality exists before transition, and ensuring production readiness before actual release of the solution.

Enterprise aware

Enterprise awareness is a crucial philosophy of the disciplined agile delivery. DAD teams work within an organization's enterprise ecosystem just like any other team. Ideally a DAD team will leverage existing resources in order to reduce overall delivery time and cost, and can work in parallel to other teams in the organization. An important aspect of enterprise awareness is that disciplined agile has explicit DevOps practices and strategies built right into the toolkit.

Lifecycles

Disciplined originally supported an agile (scrum-based) project lifecycle and a Lean (Kanban-based) project lifecycle. It has since been extended to support six lifecycles:

1. Agile. A 3-phase project lifecycle based on Scrum. The phases are Inception (what Scrum calls Sprint 0), Construction, and Transition (what Scrum sometimes called a Release sprint).
2. Lean. A 3-phase project lifecycle based on Kanban.
3. Continuous Delivery: Agile. An Agile-based product lifecycle that supports a continuous flow of work resulting in incremental releases (typically once a week).
4. Continuous Delivery: Lean. A lean-based product lifecycle that supports a continuous flow of work.
5. Exploratory. A experimentation-based lifecycle based on lean startup that has been extended to address the parallel development of minimum viable products as per the advice of cynefin.
6. Program. A lifecycle for coordinating a team of teams.

Process goals

DAD is described as a collection of twenty-one process goals, or process outcomes.

Inception Phase	Construction Phase	Transition Phase
Get the team going in the right direction.	Incrementally build a consumable solution.	Release the solution into production.
Form Team Align with Enterprise Direction Develop Common Project Vision Explore Scope Identify Architecture Strategy Plan the Release Develop Test Strategy Develop Common Vision Secure Funding	Prove Architecture Early Address Changing Stakeholder Needs Produce Potentially Consumable Solution Improve Quality Accelerate Value Delivery	Ensure Production Readiness Deploy the Solution
Ongoing Goals
Improve and work in a enterprise aware manner.
Grow Team Members Coordinate Activities Address Risk Evolve WoW Leverage and Enhance Existing Infrastructure Govern Delivery Team

Roles

Primary roles

These five primary roles in the disciplined agile delivery are typically found regardless of scale.

• Stakeholder. Someone who is materially impacted by the outcome of the solution. More than just an end-user or customer, this is anyone potentially affected by the development and deployment of a software project.
• Product owner. The person on the team who speaks as the "one voice of the customer", representing the needs of the stakeholder community to the agile delivery team.
• Team member. The team member focuses on producing the actual solution for stakeholders, including but not limited to: testing, analysis, architecture, design, programming, planning, and estimation.
• Team lead. The team lead is the agile coach, responsible for facilitating communication, optimizing processes, and ensuring the team has the resources it needs and is free of obstacles.
• Architecture owner. Makes the architecture decisions for the team and facilitates the creation and evolution of the overall solution design.

Secondary roles

These secondary roles are introduced (sometimes on a temporary basis) to address scaling issues.

• Specialist. Although most agile team members are generalizing specialists, sometimes other specialists are required depending on the needs of the project.
• Domain expert. While the product owner represents a wide range of stakeholders, a domain expert is sometimes required for complex domains where a more nuanced understanding is required.
• Technical expert. In cases where a particularly difficult problem is encountered, a technical expert can be brought in as needed. These could be build masters, agile database administrators, user experience (UX) designers, or security experts.
• Independent tester. Although the majority of testing is done by the DAD team members, in cases with complex domains or technology an independent testing team can be brought in to work in parallel to validate the work.
• Integrator. For complex technical solutions at scale, an integrator (or multiple integrators) can be used to build the entire system from its various subsystems.

Further reading

• Brown, Alan (2012). Enterprise Software Delivery: Bringing Agility and Efficiency to the Global Software Supply Chain. ISBN 978-0321803016.
• Royce, Walker (2013). "Agility at Scale: Economic Governance, Measured Improvement and Disciplined Agile Delivery".
• Supporting Governance in Disciplined Agile Delivery Using Noninvasive Measurement and Process Mining, (November 2013 Cutter IT Journal, Astromiskis, Janes, Sillitti, Succi)
• 10 Principles for Success in Distributed Agile Delivery (November 2013 Cutter IT Journal, Bavani)