The Disciplined Agile® (DA®) tool kit takes a goal-driven approach (some people like to call this a capability-driven approach or even a vector-driven approach). The purpose of DA’s goal-driven approach is that it guides people through the process-related decisions that they need to make to tailor and scale agile strategies, given the context of the situation that they face, to achieve the outcomes that they desire. This supports the DA principle that Choice is Good. This is important because every team faces a unique situation. Teams vary in size, they vary in the way that they are geographically or organizationally distributed, they vary by the domain and technical complexity that they face, and they vary by the compliancy issues that are relevant to them. Furthermore, teams are made up of unique individuals, each of whom has a set of unique skills and experiences. In short, because each agile team finds itself in a unique situation the team must find a way to effectively tailor the way that they work to best face that situation—This reflects the DA principle Context Counts. DA’s goal-driven strategy is a lightweight approach to providing advice for such process tailoring.
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The Process Goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
Figure 1 summarizes the delivery-oriented process goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). There are twenty-four goals in total, each of which is described by a Process Goal Diagram (see Figure 2 below for an example). A disciplined agile team will consider how to address each goal in a manner that reflects the situation that they face. Sometimes a goal will be very easy to address, for example, an established development team may find that they need to do nothing else to fulfill the Form Team goal. A team that is building a solution via an architecture they are very familiar with will have very little work to do to fulfill the Prove Architecture Early goal whereas a team using technologies that are new to them may have a fair bit of work to do. Different situations require different approaches.
Figure 1. The process goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). Click on a process goal for more information.
Each of the three delivery phases (Inception, Construction, and Transition) are described by specific goals. Some goals, such as Grow Team Members and Address Risk, are applicable throughout the entire life cycle. All of the process goal diagrams are available online via the links provided below in Table 1.
Table 1. The Process Goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
| Timing | Goals |
|---|---|
| Inception | |
| Construction | |
| Transition | |
| Ongoing |