The Disciplined Agile® Delivery (DAD) portion of the DA™ process tool kit includes an explicit Inception phase – sometimes called a project initiation phase, start-up phase, or iteration/sprint zero – which is conducted before Construction. The primary purpose of this phase is to do just enough work to get your team going in the right direction. You will likely need to perform some initial requirements modeling, some initial architecture modeling, some initial planning, and other organizational activities to do this. An Inception effort is required when:
- You are initiating a product team.
- You are taking a project-based approach.
- Your existing team has pivoted in a significantly different direction than what they were taking before and need to come to a common vision as to where they are now heading.
The Inception process goals are: