Free DASSM sample questions

Correct answer: Adopt the Continuous Delivery: Agile lifecycle to integrate automated testing and deployment within the iteration.

The core problem is a delay caused by a separate, manual QA phase. The Continuous Delivery: Agile lifecycle is specifically designed to address this by integrating development, testing, and deployment activities into a seamless flow. It promotes automation and cross-functional collaboration, directly targeting the handoff bottleneck. The Exploratory lifecycle is for high-uncertainty products, the Program lifecycle is for coordinating teams, and the Lean lifecycle, while good for flow, doesn't inherently mandate the integration of deployment and testing like the CD lifecycles do.

Correct answer: Collaborating, to facilitate a discussion that integrates both perspectives and finds an optimal solution for the team.

Collaboration is the ideal conflict resolution mode for Disciplined Agile teams, especially for complex technical decisions. It involves working together to find a win-win solution that addresses the underlying concerns of both parties (scalability and complexity). Competing would alienate one developer, Avoiding would let the problem fester, and Compromising might lead to a suboptimal technical solution. Collaboration aims for the best outcome by synthesizing viewpoints.

Correct answers: Facilitate the creation of a team charter or working agreements.; Organize team-building activities focused on sharing personal (non-work) stories and experiences.

A newly formed team with low trust needs explicit norms and personal connection. Facilitating a team charter or working agreements makes mutual expectations explicit and gives the team a shared foundation for how it works together. Team-building activities in which members share personal (non-work) stories build interpersonal understanding and trust, which underpins psychological safety (a DA promise: Create Psychological Safety and Embrace Diversity). Immediate individual metrics, a lead who makes all decisions, or assuming trust will appear on its own all work against safety and self-organization.

A newly formed team with low trust needs explicit norms and personal connection. Facilitating a team charter or working agreements makes mutual expectations explicit and gives the team a shared foundation for how it works together. Team-building activities in which members share personal (non-work) stories build interpersonal understanding and trust, which underpins psychological safety (a DA promise: Create Psychological Safety and Embrace Diversity). Immediate individual metrics, a lead who makes all decisions, or assuming trust will appear on its own all work against safety and self-organization.

Correct answer: Portfolio Management

Portfolio Management is a process blade in the Value Streams layer of the DA tool kit. It addresses how an organization identifies, prioritizes, organizes and governs its initiatives (projects, programs, product and service teams) across their full lifecycle, maximizing business value in a sustainable way. Coordinate Activities, Govern Delivery Team and Address Risk are ongoing process goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery that operate at the level of a single delivery team, not the enterprise portfolio. Source: PMI Disciplined Agile, Process Blades and Portfolio Management.

Correct answer: Silent Writing

Silent Writing (also known as brainwriting or silent brainstorming) is a technique where participants write down their ideas individually before sharing them with the group. This method is particularly effective for ensuring that introverted or less assertive team members have an equal opportunity to contribute their thoughts without being overshadowed by more dominant personalities. It leverages social awareness to create a more inclusive and effective collaborative environment.

Correct answer: True

True. PMI states that DAD's Program lifecycle 'describes how to organize a team of teams' for the relatively rare case of large agile teams. Subteams choose their own WoW and can be feature teams or component teams (often combined). Their work is coordinated by the Product Owners, Architecture Owners and Team Leads, and system integration and testing run in parallel. Source: PMI Disciplined Agile, DAD Life Cycle - Program.

Correct answer: Address Changing Stakeholder Needs

Address Changing Stakeholder Needs is the DA Construction process goal that describes how a team manages changing requirements and its work items. Its decision points answer questions such as 'How are we going to manage work items?', 'How are we going to prioritize changes?', 'Who will prioritize changes?' and 'What types of work items will the team address?'. Because DA work item lists include more than new features (defects, technical work such as refactoring, etc.), the prioritization options in this goal help the Product Owner balance new features against technical debt and fixes. Improve Quality covers how the team addresses technical debt, but the prioritization decision itself lives in Address Changing Stakeholder Needs. Source: Disciplined Agile 'Address Changing Stakeholder Needs' process goal (Choose Your WoW!).

Correct answer: Establish a regular Scrum of Scrums meeting with representatives from the feature teams and the Platform team.

A Scrum of Scrums (SoS) meeting is a proven technique for coordinating work and managing dependencies across multiple teams. By including a representative from the Platform team in this forum, the feature teams can raise impediments, discuss upcoming needs, and align on priorities and timelines. This directly addresses the coordination and dependency issues. Mandating process alignment can be counterproductive, and daily stand-ups with all teams are inefficient.

Correct answer: Focus on optimizing the value stream by evolving towards a Disciplined DevOps strategy. This includes embedding database and operations expertise into the feature teams, automating the deployment pipeline, and adopting the Continuous Delivery: Lean lifecycle.

This is the most comprehensive DA approach. It addresses the root cause of the delays—silos and handoffs. Evolving to Disciplined DevOps, embedding skills, automating pipelines, and adopting a flow-based lifecycle (like CD: Lean) directly tackles the identified bottlenecks in the value stream. This focuses on optimizing the whole system, not just individual team processes. Training teams in Scrum doesn't solve the handoff problem, and adding a CAB would likely increase delays.

Correct answer: Formulate questions that clarify the goal, such as "What is the current defect rate?" and "How effective is our testing process?"

The GQM approach follows a specific sequence: Goal, then Question, then Metric. After defining a goal, the next step is to formulate questions that break down the goal into quantifiable aspects. These questions then guide the selection of meaningful metrics. Jumping straight to metrics without formulating questions can lead to collecting data that doesn't actually help in achieving the goal.