What is Disciplined Agile Delivery

There are several reasons why you should consider adopting DAD. They are:

• DAD picks up where Scrum leaves off. DAD describes how all agile techniques fit together, going far beyond Scrum, to define a full agile solution delivery life cycle. Like Scrum the DAD addresses leadership, roles & responsibilities, and requirements change management. Unlike Scrum DAD doesn’t stop there, it also addresses other important aspects of software development such as architecture, design, testing, programming, documentation, deployment and many more. In short, DAD provides a much broader understanding of how agile development works in practice, doing a lot of the “heavy process lifting” that Scrum leaves up to you.
• DAD is pragmatic. The DA toolkit provides choices, not prescriptions, enabling you to easily tailor a strategy that reflects the situation that your team finds itself in. To do this effectively you need to understand the process-oriented choices you have and what the trade-offs are. DAD makes these choices explicit through its process-goal driven approach.
• DAD supports both lean and agile ways of working (WoW). DAD supports several delivery life cycles, including a Scrum-based agile life cycle, a Kanban-based lean life cycle, two continuous delivery life cycles, a Lean Startup-based exploratory life cycle, and a Program “team of teams” life cycle. Teams find themselves in unique situations, and as a result one process size does not fit all. Even in small companies we’ve seen situations where some teams are taking an agile approach, some a lean approach, and some combinations thereof.
• DAD is based on empiricism. For several years Scott Ambler, Mark Lines, and many other contributors to DAD worked in or visited hundreds of enterprises around the world in a wide range of industries and environments. DAD, and the DA tool kit in general, captures the proven strategies adopted by these organizations, describing the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy and providing guidance for when and when not to apply them.
• DAD provides a solid foundation from which to scale agile. DAD supports successful scaling of agile and lean techniques in several ways. First, its full delivery life cycles and breadth of software development advice answers how to successfully apply agile in practice. Second, its goal driven approach provides the required flexibility for tailoring your agile process to meet the challenges faced by agile teams working at scale. Third, DAD builds in many foundational concepts required at scale, including DevOps, explicit agile governance, and enterprise awareness.
• DAD enables and goes beyond SAFe. SAFe leaves the details of construction to you and as a result can prove to be fragile in many organizations. DAD provides the solid process foundation missing from SAFe and is in fact complementary to SAFe. DAD describes several strategies for organizing large or geographically distributed teams. It describes a range of options for scaling your approach to agile and lean software development, giving you context-sensitive options that SAFe doesn’t.
• DAD teams deliver solutions, not just software. DAD recognizes that the software we develop runs on hardware, which may need upgrades, and it is supported by documentation. Our stakeholders may also need to evolve their business processes, and sometimes even their organization structures, to address the new needs of the situation that they face. In short, DAD teams deliver consumable solutions that comprise software, hardware changes, supporting documentation, improved business processes, and even organizational changes.
• DAD is evolving. We’re constantly learning as practitioners, learning about and experimenting with new agile and lean strategies all of the time. These learnings are constantly being applied to evolve DAD.

Source: www.pmi.org/