Chapter 11: Disciplined Agile

So far, you have learned how Scrum evolved to support Agile practices at the team level, as well as the importance of systems thinking and Lean development practices to reduce complexity and improve efficiencies. You have also learned a good bit about the leading Scrum-based practices that provide extensions to scale Scrum across multiple teams, if not on an enterprise scale. Now we are going to turn our attention to the first of three approaches that extend the original Scrum framework with systems thinking, DevOps, Lean–Agile, and portfolio-management practices. This approach is called Disciplined Agile (DA).

As implemented by DA, systems thinking helps organizations to look at complex products and organizational structures as an integrated whole, and not the sum of their parts. Systems thinking prevents local optimizations that work against system-level functionality and performance. DA's implementation of Lean–Agile practices...