Free Practice Questions for PMI DASSM Exam

The last step in Ester Derby and Diana Larsen's 5-step retrospective template isClose the Retrospective. This step involves wrapping up the retrospective by summarizing the key takeaways, ensuring that everyone understands the agreed-upon action items, and reflecting on the meeting itself. It is an opportunity to appreciate the contributions of team members and reinforce the commitment to continuous improvement. Closing the retrospective properly helps maintain a positive and constructive atmosphere and ensures that the insights and decisions made are effectively carried forward.

The Lean governance mindset in the Disciplined Agile framework promotes principles that help teams align their work with organizational objectives while maintaining agility and responsiveness. Key elements of a Lean governance mindset include promoting transparency (B), being servant leaders (C), learning continuously (D), and leading by example (E). These elements encourage a culture where leaders support teams, foster openness and trust, and model the behaviors they want to see in others.

However, "letting the team manage the risks" (A) is not part of a Lean governance mindset. While teams are encouraged to take ownership of their work, risk management is typically a shared responsibility that involves collaboration between the team and the broader organization. In Lean governance, risks are managed in a way that aligns with the organization's overall risk tolerance and strategic objectives, rather than leaving risk management solely to the team.

This understanding aligns with the Disciplined Agile approach, which emphasizes governance as an ongoing process that integrates learning, leadership, and transparency.

The decision to keep a single Scrum team of 12 members, despite the increase in size, reflects the Disciplined Agile principle ofbeing pragmatic. This principle involves making context-sensitive decisions that balance competing priorities. In this case, although Scrum recommends smaller team sizes (ideally 10 or fewer), the team prioritized cohesiveness and delivery over strict adherence to the guideline. By being pragmatic, they chose an approach that best suits their current context and promotes better collaboration and productivity, even if it meant working with a slightly larger team. This decision also demonstrates a balance between adhering to best practices and adapting to the unique needs and dynamics of the team.

The primary role of the Product Owner in Disciplined Agile is to ensure that the team builds the right product. This includes defining and prioritizing the product backlog, making decisions on behalf of stakeholders, and ensuring that the team understands the product vision and customer needs. Options A (coordinate the product), B (organize the product team), and C (inspect the product) are aspects of the Product Owner's responsibilities, but they do not capture the overarching goal of delivering the right product to meet customer needs.

Disciplined Agile (DA) describes four views that provide a comprehensive understanding of how to apply Agile and Lean strategies across an organization. One of these views is theMindset.

TheMindsetview refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are foundational to successful agile practices within an organization. DA Mindset includes principles, promises, and guidelines that help teams understand how to make agile approaches work effectively in their specificcontext. It encompasses core values such as delighting customers, being pragmatic, and optimizing flow across the entire value stream, as well as fostering a culture of learning and adapting.

By focusing on theMindsetview, DA ensures that everyone in the organization—from team members to senior leaders—aligns with these shared principles and values, which is crucial for achieving sustainable agility and continuous improvement.

The other views in DA are thePeopleview (understanding roles and responsibilities), theFlowview (focusing on end-to-end value delivery), and thePracticesview (choosing appropriate agile practices and processes).

Even when a project follows a Scrum or Agile lifecycle, it still needs the Inception, Construction, or Transition phases as described in Disciplined Agile (DA). These phases provide a structured approach to project delivery. The "Inception" phase involves initial planning and alignment, "Construction" focuses on iterative development, and "Transition" ensures the final product is ready for release. While Scrum and Agile frameworks focus on iterative and incremental development, DA uses these phases to ensure a comprehensive approach to project management.

In Disciplined Agile, the daily huddle or daily stand-up is referred to as a "coordination meeting." The purpose of this meeting is to allow the team members to coordinate their work, identify any impediments, and align their activities to meet the team’s goals. This term emphasizes the focus on coordinating efforts rather than simply following a ritual. Unlike a "daily meeting" (A), "Scrum meeting" (C), or "Sprint review" (D), the coordination meeting is specifically about the daily alignment and coordination, not about reviewing or planning the work in detail.

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.

The Minimum Business Increment (MBI) is a tool used in Disciplined Agile to sequence work in a way that delivers value quickly. An MBI represents the smallest piece of functionality that delivers business value to customers or stakeholders, and it is fully usable upon release. By focusing on MBIs, teams can prioritize work that maximizes the delivery of value, ensures faster feedback, and enables quicker realization of benefits.

Options A (Planning Poker) and C (Minimum Viable Product, MVP) are related to estimation and product development strategies, while Option C (WIP limits) focuses on managing workflow efficiency rather than directly sequencing work for quick value delivery.

References:

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

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

A value stream map is a lean tool that visually maps out the steps in a process from start to finish to identify areas of waste, delays, or inefficiencies in delivering value to the customer. In Disciplined Agile (DA), value stream mapping helps the team identify problem areas where waste occurs, such as bottlenecks, excessive handoffs, or unnecessary steps that do not add value to the customer. By recognizing these problem areas, the team can focus on improving or eliminating them to optimize the value delivery process. Options A, C, and D provide specific strategies for improving processes but do not encompass the broad benefit of identifying problem areas in realizing value.