DA is a toolkit; it contains strategies, principles, and practices that allow you to choose an appropriate Agile path based on your desired outcome. It is a set of guidance and helps you decide which Agile practices and frameworks may work best in your unique situation. It thus removes the constraints and boundaries imposed by prescribed frameworks.

In typical Agile Transformations, organizations and teams decide to adopt a methodology or a framework based on how well it has worked for others. Usually, the methods or frameworks are prescriptive and general purpose. Initially, such an approach works well to reduce the change management efforts and provides clear guidance about practices and processes. However, such a linear approach rarely works in practice for long. The issues of scalability and adaptability arise out of the unique needs of every organization, team, and project. When organizations face these challenges, the usual response is to tweak the situations and respond to fit the chosen methodology or framework.

Disciplined Agile Toolkit provides an alternate approach. It does not define or prescribe any new methodology or framework. But it amalgamates many leading prescriptions and guides you about which works best for your situation. In addition, it adopts an outcome-driven approach to your process definition so that you can choose the best “Way of Working” (WoW) that directly and effectively addresses your unique needs, goals, and objectives.

Disciplined Agile Delivery works at optimizing your delivery at three levels, individual teams, the team of teams, and the entire enterprise. While most frameworks like SCRUM and Kanban are focused on the delivery functions, DA addresses scalability, DevOps, and all other aspects of enterprise agility.

Many agile practices tend to be suited best for a specific type of team, organization, or context. This specificity might limit a team from harnessing its full potential. Such agile teams can perform better if they choose between the various practices and tailor them to their unique needs. 

This flexibility is where Disciplined Agile or DA comes in. This article will tell you all about DA, its components, how it works, and its advantages.

Let’s begin, shall we?

What Is Disciplined Agile (DA)?

Disciplined Agile is a hybrid toolkit that harnesses various agile approaches like Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP, and others to give a team or organization the best way of working (WoW) suited for the given context.

Other Agile methods usually focus on a set of best practices. But DA is different. It acts as a guide to let you choose the best way of working depending on the situation. It puts individuals first and takes a learning-oriented approach so that you, your team, and your organization can evolve and grow. 

The DA toolkit helps organizations streamline business functions like finance, software development (solution delivery), IT operations, and enterprise architecture. 

Origin of Disciplined Agile

Disciplined Agile was developed by software engineers Scott Ambler and Mark Lines while working at IBM. They created a scalable and sustainable toolkit based on their observations on software projects. The toolkit aimed to fill in the process gaps ignored by other scaled agile methodologies.

The book “Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner’s Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise” first introduced Disciplined Agile Delivery in 2012. The book broadly focused on various process decisions in organizations. Later subsets were developed that focused more on specific areas like Disciplined DevOps, Disciplined Agile IT, Disciplined and Agile Enterprise. 

In August 2019, the Project Management Institute (PMI) acquired Disciplined Agile. And now DA is one of the most sought-after scaled agile frameworks.

What Are Different Components of DA?

Disciplined Agile is more of a toolkit than a framework. Unlike other agile “best practices,” DA guides you to consider the available options, consider various decisions you need to take, and trade-offs associated with the possibilities. It is a process-decision toolkit that allows you to choose your way of working to suit your needs. 

The DA toolkit has mainly two components: Views and Layers.

Four views

Mindset

The DA mindset comprises principles, promises, and guidelines based on the foundations of agile and lean. These act as a philosophical foundation to address the enterprise realities. 

These aspects are delighting the customers, being pragmatic, having choices, enterprise awareness, embracing diversity, collaboration, psychological safety, design thinking, and continuous improvement.

People

Unlike other agile methodologies, DA allows you to take up one or more roles. Thus, it is a people-first methodology where the agile team gets to choose their way of working (WoW). 

Irrespective of the size of the team and level of scale, you can take up primary roles like stakeholder, team member, team lead, product owner, or architecture owner. In addition, during scaling, you can also take up secondary or supporting roles like specialist, domain expert, technical expert, independent tester, or integrator.

Flow

Flowcharts, workflow diagrams, lifecycle diagrams – all of these help you to visualize dynamic processes. DA is more focused on streamlining various processes by considering the whole organization. You can apply the toolkit to segment activities and understand how they flow together.

Practices

The toolkit outlines various techniques and methods that help your team move forward. When scaling agile, DA tackles scaling at the team level and scaling at the organizational level separately. It has two types: tactical scaling (team level) and strategic scaling (executive level).

Four layers

Foundation

This layer has various foundational concepts of the DA toolkit like the mindset, principles, guidelines, promises, and other views. It also includes foundational concepts of agile, lean, traditional approaches, and team structure. Finally, it provides you with the basics to choose your way of working.

Disciplined DevOps 

DevOps provides best practices to streamline both software development and IT operations. Disciplined DevOps further extends to enterprise-level by integrating security, data management, release management, and support. The software development or solution delivery layer of Disciplined DevOps is the Disciplined Agile Delivery or DAD.

Value streams

Value streams are the set of actions that provide value for the customers. Starting with an initial request, it passes through other stages of development and ends with delivery and support. The DA toolkit’s value stream layer provides guidance for business operations, continuous improvement, marketing, product management, research and development, and sales. 

Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE)

The primary purpose of agility is to help a team or enterprise quickly adapt to marketplace changes. The organizational culture and structure play an important in facilitating these changes. This layer focuses on people management, information, asset management, and transformation at the enterprise level. 

How Does DA work?

The fundamental principle of Disciplined Agile is to let the teams choose their way of working – the proper process to suit their needs. This freedom is because every organization is different, and every team within an organization is unique. And so are the problems and situations that they face.

Even though there are many tried and tested “best practices” out there, they may not always work well in all situations. But you will know if a practice works well for your problem or not only after applying it. When you realize that it is not suited to your context, you would have wasted time, energy, and resources.

In DA, an agile team makes small changes to their WoW while focusing on continuous improvement. After you identify an issue, you consider a potential enhancement. And as an experiment, this new way of working is tried, and its effectiveness is analyzed. If it is effective, then the new WoW is adopted; otherwise, consider a new WoW. In both cases, you share the learnings with others.

Here, the teams have the freedom to choose, test, and experiment with various techniques. They base these experiments on their skills, experiences, and learnings from others.

How Does DA differ from Other Agile frameworks?

By now, you might be wondering how DA is different from the other agile frameworks. Allow us to explain.

The main difference is that in other agile approaches, you have a ready-made framework. In DA, all the stakeholders come together to design a framework based on the DA’s toolkit’s techniques. Thus, you have the freedom to choose various practices from different agile approaches.

The freedom of choice in DA allows you to move in any direction that seems fit for the context. Other agile approaches force you to move in a particular direction.

It’s not just the way of working you get to choose. You get to choose your roles too. Usually, agile frameworks have pre-defined roles that a team leader and member can take up. But in DA, you can select your functions – more than one.

DA is a hybrid approach that includes several practices and techniques from other agile methods like Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and XP.

In the other agile frameworks, the focus is more on product development and how to solve problems regarding the product – product’s way of working. With DA, it’s more on the project’s way of working that also supports optimized product development and continuous improvement.

What are the advantages of using DA?

Let’s now see the various benefits and advantages of using Disciplined Agile.

• DA is a goal-based strategy where teams explore and experiment with different methods and techniques to develop a tailor-made way to suit their needs. More chances of success.
• Teams are allowed to have more autonomy and freedom to make decisions. This autonomy increases engagement and empowers them.
• DA toolkit is not limited to a specific type of team. Teams of any size and style, including product development, software development, marketing, sales, finance, and IT operations, can use the toolkit.
• Many organizations that have agile teams often need separate scaling agile frameworks to apply at the enterprise level. But with DA, you can implement it with a group of any size and quickly scale it to the whole organization.  
• One of the main principles of Disciplined Agile is customer delight. This principle will guide the teams to develop products that keep the customers happy. This outcome helps you to gain customer trust and loyalty.
• When you have better products with customer satisfaction, you get to stay ahead in the competitive market. 
• DA by design is a hybrid framework that combines all the good practices from various agile approaches. This integration fills all the gaps that have been left unaddressed by other agile methods.

What is the criticism of DA?

Yes, Disciplined Agile is a hybrid approach that includes all the best practices of other frameworks. But still, it is not devoid of a few weaknesses.

The biggest weakness of DA is that it is difficult for non-agile teams to get started with it quickly. If the team is new to Agile, they may find the toolkit overwhelming in its entirety. However, such groups can focus on the problem they want to solve, and DA’s practices incrementally implement them.

DA doesn’t provide any strict guidance on how to use the techniques, approaches, and roles. As a result, if a team is non-agile or is not self-organizing, they might find themselves lost.

Due to the lack of guidance, new organizations often need to hire professional consultants. Unfortunately, this is quite expensive, and it takes much time for the non-agile teams to understand agile and transition to DA.

Summary

Disciplined Agile is a toolkit that guides the agile teams to choose the best practices and techniques to suit their needs. As a result, they have the freedom to select a context-sensitive way of working and provide a solid foundation for business agility. DA is best suited for teams and organizations already trained and experienced in agile methodologies as a hybrid of multiple agile approaches.