ComparisonScaling Software Development - ZeroBlockers vs DAD: Which scaling framework is better for you?

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a toolkit that provides a list of activities that teams can choose from to improve their way of working. The challenge is that it is a library and doesn't offer any recommendations on which activities to use. This can lead to analysis paralysis or the selection of inappropriate activities.

The ZeroBlockers framework is an opinionated way of working. The approach stems from the belief that you cannot manage dependencies. The overhead involved continually increases and the teams end up being blocked anyway. The blocking dependencies must be removed to improve efficiency. In particular code must be separated to avoid merge conflicts and the associated delays.

DAD is published by the Project Management Institute so its background is based on project management principles, including the idea that a project has a fixed scope. There are no activities in the DAD library around validating the customer demand or interest in an idea. It is focused on delivery.

ZeroBlockers believes that you cannot know how customers will react to new features until they have them in their hands. It is not fair to ask a business person to specify the outcome of a feature because we don't know. We all have ideas that sound great but few of them work. Therefore solution evaluation and iteration are integral parts of the process. The core metric is whether customers change their behaviour as a result of the feature.

Shared code is subject to the tragedy of the commons. Each team has a tight deadline so they need to cut corners at the end. While DAD advocates adding technical debt reduction items to the backlog based on PO and Architecture Owner prioritisation it is difficult to fix all of the issues given the incentive to produce debt in every release. That is why in ZeroBlockers each team owns their own code. They are responsible for ensuring the health of their code so they can work sustainably.

There are a million ways we can change how we work but not all of them are improvements. This can lead to battles of opinions unless there is a clear vision. DAD gives a range of options for improvement but doesn't provide a vision that will help teams decide what improvements to make. ZeroBlockers has a vision of having zero blockers in the flow of work so teams now have a target to aim towards and something to use to compare alternative options for improvement. You'd be surprised how much time this saves.

Burnout isn't caused by challenging targets. It is caused by being held to targets that you can't control such as an unrealistic deadline that was imposed on you. By giving teams autonomy over the way they achieve the product goals you are putting them in control. We can still set challenging stretch targets but, once teams can control how they achieve the targets, this can energise rather than cause burnout.

DAD follows a similar approach to Scrum at the team level with a PO defining what is to be built and the team building it. There is an Architecture Owner role as well to ensure good architecture.

The ZeroBlockers approach is that we don't know exactly what customers want so the team needs to uncover the best solutions to build. This means that the team needs to do research, ideate on potential solutions, evaluate them using experiments and then build the winning ideas iteratively so the team can continue to improve the solution over time. Architecture is emergent rather than prescribed because the solution that we initially think of will likely be wrong.

DAD is flexible in terms of how teams manage to scale projects/products. The roles and their way of working are to be decided based on the company and context. This means that there is no clear guidance on how to staff teams or what activities to perform.

The ZeroBlockers view is scaling product teams is complicated and leaving it up to each company is inviting a re-invention of the wheel with unnecessary wasted time and effort. Product Teams need to provide direction for Stream Teams and enable them to operate autonomously.

Again, scaling is complicated and leaving it up to each company is inviting wasted time and effort. ZeroBlockers provides a clear way to scale by either scaling Products or introducing Ecosystem teams to enable scaling up to enterprise levels.

DAD is a toolkit rather than a framework. It may appear that it is easier to adopt as you could adopt individual practices but everything in our current way of working is connected. Changing one thing impacts on others. That is why change is so hard. By not being prescriptive, DAD is leaving the hard work of trying to figure out the interdependencies up to the people adopting it.

ZeroBlockers involves changes across the business - because software is integral to our products today - not something just tacked on. This means you need more buy-in to get started. But you can start small - one product, one value stream. And all of the interconnected challenges have already been worked out. With over 10 years of UXDX content and case studies, there is also a large body of resources to assist in the rollout of the framework. It might be tougher to implement but it will deliver better outcomes.