DASSM PMI Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) Exam Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Disciplined Agile provides a solid foundation for business agility by (A) creating awesome teams that foster joy and (D) describing the trade-offs associated with a range of options. Creating awesome teams involves building a positive and productive team environment where team members are engaged, motivated, and empowered. Describing trade-offs allows teams to make informed decisions by understanding the implications of different practices and approaches. While "enforcing adherence to organizational standards" (C) and "defining a framework for agility at scale" (B) are part of Disciplined Agile, they are not specifically highlighted as primary ways DA fosters business agility.

The process blade most likely to offer potential techniques for setting up mechanisms for teams to share their learnings with other teams isContinuous Improvement. In Disciplined Agile, the Continuous Improvement blade encompasses activities and practices that foster a culture of learning, adaptation, and improvement. This includes mechanisms for sharing lessons learned, best practices, and knowledge across teams to enhance organizational agility and effectiveness. Techniques under this blade may involve communities of practice, internal knowledge-sharing sessions, retrospectives, and other collaborative activities that support learning and improvement at scale.

"Ensure production readiness" is one of the process goals in the transition stage of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework. During the transition phase, the team focuses on finalizing the product and preparing it for release, which includes activities like final testing, user training, and deployment planning to ensure the solution is ready for production use. Options A (Produce a potentially consumable solution) and B (Develop common vision) are more aligned with earlier phases, such as Inception or Construction. Option D (Address risk) is a goal throughout the lifecycle but is not specific to the transition phase.

The principle "Organize around products/services" meansbuilding dedicated cross-functional teams focused on customer offerings. This approach ensures that teams are aligned directly with the delivery of customer value, with all the necessary skills to deliver a complete product or service. This organization enhances focus, collaboration, and efficiency, driving greater value delivery to customers.

Option A (asking customers to pick from available products) does not reflect this principle, and Option C (project teams being best equipped) does not align with the DA emphasis on long-standing, product-focused teams over temporary project teams.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

If the frequency of changes to requirements is very high (almost daily), the Continuous Delivery Agile lifecycle model makes the most sense. This model is designed to handle frequent changes by integrating and delivering work continuously, ensuring that new requirements are incorporated quickly and effectively. Options A (Scrum) and D (Agile) provide iterative approaches, but they may not handle daily changes as efficiently as a continuous delivery model. Option B (Lean) focuses on optimizing flow and reducing waste but does not specifically address handling frequent requirement changes.

"Organization distribution" is not a tactical scaling factor for a team in the context of Disciplined Agile (DA). Tactical scaling factors focus on specific elements that impact the immediate team context, such as Team Size (A), Geographic Distribution (B), and Team Maturity (C). "Organization distribution" refers more broadly to the structure or distribution of the organization as a whole, rather than directly impacting the team's day-to-day operations or scaling concerns.

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The responsibility for choosing the team's lifecycle in Disciplined Agile (DA)depends on the context. DA promotes a context-driven approach where decisions are made based on the specific needs, objectives, and constraints of the team and the organization. In some cases, the team itself may choose the lifecycle that best fits its way of working. In other scenarios, the decision could be influenced by an Agile coach, team manager, or organizational guidelines. Therefore, it is not a one-size-fits-all answer, and the context determines who is best suited to make this decision.

The Continuous Delivery Lean life cycle is suitable when there is an experienced team working on a product or service where the requirements change frequently, potentially daily. This life cycle supports frequent deployments and quick feedback loops, making it ideal for environments where requirements are dynamic and evolve rapidly. Options A, D, and E do not align with the conditions that necessitate a Continuous Delivery Lean approach, as they involve either less experienced teams or slower-evolving requirements.

Governance is indeed a critical aspect in Disciplined Agile (DA) projects. While it is true that many DA teams are self-organizing, governance provides oversight, ensures alignment with organizational goals, and helps mitigate risks. Disciplined Agile recognizes the importance of governance to maintain quality and compliance, manage risk, and deliver value. Therefore, "False" is the correct answer because governance remains a critical issue regardless of the self-organizing nature of the teams, ensuring that practices align with organizational policies and objectives.

Guided continuous improvementextends the Kaizen loop strategy by providing structured, context-specific guidance to teams on how to identify and implement techniques likely to be effective for their unique circumstances. This method emphasizes learning from experience, adjusting practices based on outcomes, and aligning improvements with the organization's goals, enhancing the team's ability to adapt and improve continuously.

Options A (Cross-team learning), C (Explicit workflow policies), and D (Communities of Practice) are valuable for learning and improvement but do not specifically focus on providing guided, context-sensitive strategies for improvement.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

When introducing new features to a large, existing product, the product team should employ the Minimum Business Increment (MBI) technique. In the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, an MBI is a small, releasable component that delivers recognizable business value to a customer or user. Unlike a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which is often used for new products or market exploration, an MBI is suitable for incrementally enhancing existing products by delivering value in manageable pieces. This approach allows teams to release new features more frequently and receive feedback more rapidly, helping them to prioritize future work based on actual customer and business needs. Continuous Integration (A) is a practice of merging code frequently to prevent integration issues, while Pull System (B) is related to Lean practices of managing work in progress. MVP (D) is generally used for launching new products rather than adding to an existing one.

The least suitable way to adopt Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is touse any of the prescribed methods and follow to the letter. DAD emphasizes flexibility and the need to adapt practices to the specific context of the team or organization. Blindly following a method without considering the unique needs, challenges, and goals of the team contradicts the adaptive and context-sensitive nature of Disciplined Agile. Options B, C, and D (taking advice from "Choose Your WoW", starting with DAD, or working with an experienced coach) are all suitable ways to adopt DAD, as they involve guidance, adaptation, and learning.

References:

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI.

The "Definition of Done" (DoD) is a checklist that specifies the criteria that must be met for a user story or product increment to be considered complete by the team. It provides a shared understanding among team members and stakeholders of what it means for work to be finished. The DoD ensures that all user stories meet a minimum quality standard and are ready for production or release. It is not related to when the team is done with the iteration (B) or with estimating user stories (C).

It is false to say that all the process goal diagrams need to be explored while determining the initial Way of Working (WoW). In Disciplined Agile (DA), teams are encouraged to focus on the most relevant process goals based on their specific context, objectives, and constraints. Exploring every possible process goal would be impractical and unnecessary; instead, the team should prioritize and tailor their WoW to address the most critical factors for their situation.

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Governance in a Disciplined Agile (DA) project involves ensuring that the organization's standards, practices, and compliance requirements are being met while allowing teams to operate within a defined framework. It includes activities such as creating forums for sharing knowledge (A), making decisions about funding (B), administering rewards and recognition (C), ensuring compliance with a regulatory standard (E), and having a defined process for decision-making (F).

However, governance does not mean giving the team complete freedom to make decisions (D). In DA, while teams are encouraged to be self-organizing and empowered, they must still operate within the constraints of organizational governance policies and practices. Governance ensures there is a balance between team autonomy and alignment with organizational goals and standards. Therefore, "complete freedom to the team to make decisions" is not aligned with the DA approach to governance.

This aligns with the principles found in the PMI Disciplined Agile framework, which emphasizes both flexibility and control. In DA, governance is about guiding and monitoring the team’s activities to align with the organizational context, rather than granting unrestricted autonomy.

In Disciplined Agile, limiting work-in-progress (WIP) is crucial to optimizing flow within a team. By reducing the number of tasks being worked on at any given time, teams are better able to focus on completing a smaller set of high-priority items, which reduces context switching and increases efficiency. This focus leads to faster delivery of high-quality work. Options like "A. Pursue multiple goals at a time" and "C. Preventing priority changes" are contrary to the benefits of limiting WIP, and "D. Respect the timebox" is less relevant in the context of optimizing flow. Thus, "B. Create focus" is the correct answer.

In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, "process blades" represent different areas of an organization's processes that need to be addressed for effective agile implementation. The process blades are grouped into three primary categories:

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD):This category focuses on end-to-end delivery processes that bring a product or solution from idea to implementation, incorporating agile and lean approaches.

Disciplined DevOps:This category deals with practices that facilitate efficient development and operations, ensuring continuous delivery, integration, and deployment of software.

Disciplined Project Management Office (PMO):This process blade relates to the governance and oversight of agile initiatives, aligning them with organizational strategies and goals.

These categories provide a structured way to organize process-related activities and ensure a holistic approach to agile adoption, covering various facets from development to operations and governance.References:

"Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working (WoW)", PMI, Scott Ambler & Mark Lines.

PMI’s Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) curriculum materials.

The Disciplined Agile (DA) principle of "Accelerate value delivery" reflects the importance of minimizing the cost of delay. Cost of delay measures the impact of time on the value delivery, emphasizing the need to deliver valuable work quickly to maximize its benefits. While Option D (Optimize flow) is related to managing work effectively, it does not specifically highlight the urgency of reducing the cost of delay. Options A (Keep workloads within capacity) and C (Collaborate proactively) are important DA principles but do not directly address this concept.

We can identify our challenges "by visualizing our workflow to identify what blocks it." Visualizing the workflow, such as through a Kanban board or value stream map, helps teams see where bottlenecks, delays, or inefficiencies occur. This visualization makes it easier to pinpoint problems and areas for improvement. While holding retrospectives (B), finding where frustrations arise (C), and trying good practices to identify failures (D) are all valuable techniques, visualizing workflow is a foundational Lean practice for identifying and addressing challenges in real time.