What arc Disciplined Agile milestones based on?

Disciplined Agile (DA) milestones are a fundamental component of its lean governance framework. Unlike traditional, documentation-heavy phase gates, DA milestones are lightweight, risk-based checkpoints. They provide key stakeholders with visibility into the initiative and opportunities to make critical decisions at opportune times. Milestones such as "Proven Architecture," "Continued Viability," and "Sufficient Functionality" are explicitly designed to mitigate common project risks (technical, financial, market) early and ensure the team remains focused on delivering consumable solutions that provide real business value. This approach embodies the lean principles of minimizing waste and maximizing value, which are central to DA's governance strategy.

A. Continuous integration: This is a technical practice for frequently merging code. While it supports achieving milestones, it is not the basis for defining what those governance milestones are.
B. Documentation: Documentation is a work product. DA promotes lean, pragmatic documentation, but the milestones themselves are based on mitigating risk and proving value, not on producing documents.
D. Lifecycle: A lifecycle (e.g., Agile, Lean) is the end-to-end process framework a team adopts. The milestones are governance points within a lifecycle, but their existence and purpose are dictated by lean governance principles.

1. Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. (2019). Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working. Project Management Institute.

Page 315, Chapter 19, Section "Governing Disciplined Agile Teams": "A lean governance approach is risk and value driven... To govern DAD teams effectively, you need to look at the key risks that they face. The DAD lifecycle explicitly includes several risk-based milestones that your governance function can and should leverage." This passage directly links DA milestones to a lean, risk-based governance strategy.

Page 316, Figure 19.2: This figure explicitly lists the "Risk-Based Milestones of DAD" as part of the governance chapter, reinforcing their role as a governance mechanism.