DASSM (Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master) certification: my experience and how I prepared

Opening the toolbox… Happy to share another great achievement: DASSM (Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master) certification!

Disciplined Agile (DA) is a toolkit that brings together hundreds of agile and lean practices to help you choose the best way to work in your context. No ready recipe: context counts. Daily life asks for situational decisions, and DA guides the “best next step”.

My heartfelt thanks to Adriano Tavares and Anderson Sales for the teachings, encouragement and support on this journey. Choose Your WoW!

DA has a very interesting pragmatic and multi-framework vision. Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, DevOps… it integrates everything and shows when and why to apply each thing. It focuses on flow and results, optimizing lead/cycle time, reducing WIP and continuously improving. And it prepares you to lead in complex contexts, coordinating teams, managing dependencies with light governance.

If you already master the agile foundation and want to elevate team (and organization) maturity by choosing practices with intention, DASSM fits like a glove.

What you need to know: it’s not a framework, it’s a toolkit with meta-principles (Delight Customers, Be Awesome, Pragmatism, Context Counts, Choice is Good, Optimize Flow, Enterprise Awareness). Always check current requirements at PMI/Disciplined Agile because they can change. The exam privileges situational questions, contextual decisions are more important than memorizing definitions.

Rule of thumb: always choose the alternative that maximizes value now, maintains healthy flow, reduces risk and respects explicit policies with light organizational governance.

I treated it as a real project:

In summary, Planning, I defined target date and created short and consistent daily routine, Official base, I focused on “Choose Your WoW!” (DA Delivery Handbook), Disciplined Agile Mindset & Principles, and Process Goals with Decision Points (goal -> options -> trade-offs), Course with Adriano Tavares and Anderson Sales, consolidated situational and practical vision, Active review, I made mind maps of the most frequent processes (Explore Scope, Architecture, Quality, Coordination, Governance, DevOps/Release) and case studies analyzing scenario -> chosen option -> why (trade-offs) and Simulators, focus on context reasoning, explaining the choice aloud.

Less noise, more depth: I focused on official material + few high-quality references.

The domains that appear most: Mindset & DA Principles (context -> prescription), Process Goals (decisions and options), Flow/Lean & Kanban (WIP, explicit policies, metrics), Architecture/Quality, DevOps & Release, Team Coordination, and Light Governance & Enterprise Awareness.

If you’re going to take it, I suggest 3-4 weeks: first week on DA mindset + principles and toolkit overview; second week on flow/lean & kanban, metrics and explicit policies; third week on architecture/quality + DevOps/release; last week on coordination/governance with simulators and error review.

Context counts always, adapt response to scenario (constraints, risk, culture, compliance). Prefer stable flow over peaks, limit WIP and prefer short feedback. Light governance with outcome metrics is better than bureaucracy. Built-in quality (automation, DoD) is better than late inspection. Transparency + explicit policies always beat heroism and shortcuts.

The materials that helped me most were “Choose Your WoW!” (DA Delivery Handbook), the course by Adriano Tavares and Anderson Sales, mind maps of process goals and decisions, and support readings like Scrum Guide, Kanban Guide, Lean principles and XP practices.

Choose Your WoW! Shall we go together? How can I help you?