CASP
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CASP
The Certified Agile Scaling Practitioner (CASP) equips professionals with practical knowledge to analyze, design, and implement scaling strategies across multiple agile teams, ensuring alignment, efficiency, and value delivery.
Who Should Take This
It is intended for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Project Leads who have at least two years of experience leading agile teams and seek to expand their capability to coordinate larger, multiāteam initiatives. These learners aim to master comparative framework analysis and organizational design to drive sustainable scaling outcomes.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Scaling Fundamentals
2
Domain 2: Multi-Team Coordination
3
Domain 3: Scaling Frameworks Comparison
4
Domain 4: Organizational Design for Scale
5
Domain 5: Technical Practices for Scaling
6
Domain 6: Metrics for Scaled Environments
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
80 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Scaling Fundamentals
4 topics
Why and when to scale
- Apply criteria for determining when scaling is genuinely necessary versus when perceived scaling needs can be addressed through team restructuring, scope reduction, or dependency elimination.
- Analyze the costs and risks of premature scaling including coordination overhead, communication complexity, and reduced team autonomy to evaluate the true need for multi-team structures.
- Apply SAFe awareness to understand its core elements (ART, PI Planning, solution train) and evaluate when its prescriptive structure benefits versus constrains organizational agility.
- Analyze scaling framework adoption failures to identify common anti-patterns including premature scaling, over-engineering coordination, and framework cargo culting.
- Design a scaling adoption roadmap that incrementally introduces coordination practices based on observed pain points rather than prescriptive framework rollout.
Scaling principles
- Apply core scaling principles including minimize dependencies, maximize team autonomy, maintain empiricism at every level, and optimize for flow across the entire system.
- Analyze the tension between standardization for consistency and localization for context-appropriate practices when scaling agile across diverse teams and products.
- Design a scaling approach that preserves the core Scrum values and empirical process control while extending coordination mechanisms to address multi-team delivery challenges.
- Apply empirical process control at scale by creating short feedback loops across multiple teams that enable rapid course correction without centralized command structures.
Complexity in scaled environments
- Apply complexity theory to understand how inter-team interactions create emergent behaviors, unpredictable dependencies, and nonlinear delivery dynamics in scaled environments.
- Analyze the communication pathways in a multi-team structure using Brooks' Law and network theory to identify where coordination overhead threatens delivery throughput.
- Design team structures and interaction patterns that reduce communication complexity while maintaining sufficient coordination for integrated product delivery.
Scaling anti-patterns
- Analyze common scaling anti-patterns including component team silos, scaled daily standups that become status meetings, fake integration, and framework tourism to identify root causes and corrections.
- Design early warning indicators and health checks that detect scaling dysfunction before it undermines delivery predictability and team morale.
2
Domain 2: Multi-Team Coordination
4 topics
Dependency management
- Apply dependency identification techniques including dependency mapping, cross-team backlog analysis, and architecture review to make inter-team dependencies visible and manageable.
- Analyze dependency patterns to classify them as knowledge dependencies, task dependencies, or resource dependencies and evaluate strategies for eliminating, reducing, or managing each type.
- Design dependency resolution strategies including team reorganization, API contracts, shared services, and architectural decoupling to reduce cross-team delivery risk.
- Apply shared Definition of Done practices across multiple teams to ensure integration quality, eliminate ambiguity about completeness, and reduce cross-team rework.
- Design cross-team coordination mechanisms (Scrum of Scrums, integration cadences, shared boards) tailored to the specific dependency patterns and team count in the organization.
Cross-team events and synchronization
- Apply cross-team synchronization events including Scrum of Scrums, overall Sprint Planning, joint Sprint Reviews, and integration retrospectives to maintain alignment across teams.
- Analyze the effectiveness of cross-team events by evaluating whether they surface impediments, resolve dependencies, and produce integrated increments versus generating coordination theater.
- Design a cross-team event cadence that provides sufficient synchronization without overwhelming teams with meetings, optimizing the coordination-to-delivery time ratio.
- Apply techniques for managing shared component ownership including inner source models, shared code stewardship, and contribution guidelines that prevent component team bottlenecks.
Shared backlog and integration strategies
- Apply shared Product Backlog management techniques to coordinate work selection across multiple teams while preserving each team's autonomy in Sprint Planning and execution.
- Analyze integration strategies including continuous integration, Sprint-level integration, and release-train integration to evaluate their impact on feedback cycle time and delivery risk.
- Design an integration strategy that ensures multiple teams produce a single coherent Increment each Sprint, with clear integration standards, automated verification, and rapid feedback.
Cross-team communities of practice
- Apply community-of-practice design principles to create cross-team forums for knowledge sharing, practice alignment, and collective problem-solving in scaled environments.
- Analyze the health and impact of communities of practice by evaluating participation rates, knowledge diffusion metrics, and their contribution to reducing cross-team impediments.
3
Domain 3: Scaling Frameworks Comparison
5 topics
Nexus framework
- Apply the Nexus framework principles including the Nexus Integration Team, Nexus Sprint Backlog, cross-team refinement, and integrated Increment to coordinate three to nine Scrum teams.
- Analyze the strengths and limitations of Nexus including its lightweight nature, single-product focus, and Scrum-centric assumptions to evaluate its fit for specific organizational contexts.
- Apply OKR (Objectives and Key Results) alignment across teams and value streams to create strategic coherence without prescriptive task assignment.
- Analyze value stream lead time decomposition to identify where work items spend the most time waiting between teams, process stages, or approval gates.
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)
- Apply LeSS principles including one Product Backlog, one Product Owner, shared Sprint events, and feature teams to scale Scrum while maintaining simplicity and empiricism.
- Analyze the organizational implications of LeSS adoption including the requirement for feature teams, single Product Owner, and organizational de-scaling to evaluate readiness and feasibility.
- Apply capacity allocation patterns to reserve team capacity for innovation, technical debt reduction, and unplanned work alongside planned feature delivery.
- Analyze portfolio-level risk by evaluating the impact of delayed initiatives, competing priorities, and resource constraints on overall strategic goal achievement.
Scrum@Scale
- Apply the Scrum@Scale framework including the Scrum Master Cycle, Product Owner Cycle, Executive Action Team, and MetaScrum to coordinate delivery and strategy at enterprise scale.
- Analyze Scrum@Scale's modular approach and fractal structure to evaluate how organizations can adopt specific components incrementally rather than implementing the entire framework at once.
SAFe awareness and comparison
- Apply knowledge of SAFe's core concepts including Agile Release Trains, Program Increments, PI Planning, and the four configurations to understand how SAFe addresses enterprise-scale challenges.
- Analyze the trade-offs between SAFe's prescriptive structure and lighter frameworks including implementation complexity, organizational fit, team autonomy impact, and certification investment.
Framework selection and customization
- Analyze organizational characteristics including size, product complexity, regulatory environment, and culture to evaluate which scaling framework or combination of elements best fits the context.
- Design a customized scaling approach that selectively adopts elements from multiple frameworks, tailored to the organization's specific constraints, culture, and maturity level.
- Design a scaling framework adoption roadmap that introduces coordination mechanisms incrementally, validates their effectiveness empirically, and avoids big-bang framework rollouts.
4
Domain 4: Organizational Design for Scale
4 topics
Team topologies for scaling
- Apply team topology concepts including stream-aligned teams, enabling teams, complicated subsystem teams, and platform teams to design organizational structures optimized for scaled delivery.
- Analyze the impact of team topology choices on inter-team communication patterns, cognitive load distribution, and delivery flow to evaluate structural effectiveness.
- Design a team topology strategy that evolves as the organization scales, with defined interaction modes, clear team boundaries, and deliberate coupling decisions.
- Apply feature team versus component team analysis to determine the optimal team structure that minimizes handoffs while maintaining necessary specialization.
- Analyze the impact of organizational restructuring on team stability, social bonds, and accumulated knowledge to minimize disruption during team redesign.
Feature teams versus component teams
- Analyze the trade-offs between feature teams and component teams including end-to-end ownership, skill specialization, code ownership boundaries, and delivery independence.
- Design a migration strategy for transitioning from component teams to feature teams including skill development plans, gradual boundary expansion, and architectural enablement.
- Apply guild and chapter structures to enable cross-team skill development and knowledge sharing without creating competing management hierarchies.
- Design organizational learning systems that capture and disseminate scaling lessons learned across the organization through retrospectives, wikis, and knowledge-sharing events.
Product area and value stream organization
- Apply product area organization principles to group multiple teams around related product functionality, reducing cross-area dependencies and enabling focused delivery.
- Analyze the alignment between organizational structure and value streams to identify mismatches where structural boundaries impede the flow of value to customers.
- Design a value-stream-aligned organizational structure that optimizes team placement for end-to-end customer value delivery while managing necessary cross-cutting concerns.
Platform and shared services design
- Apply platform team design principles to create internal developer platforms that accelerate stream-aligned teams through self-service infrastructure, tooling, and reusable components.
- Analyze the tension between platform standardization and team autonomy to evaluate where platform mandates are justified and where teams should have freedom to choose their own tools.
5
Domain 5: Technical Practices for Scaling
4 topics
Continuous integration across teams
- Apply continuous integration practices across multiple teams including trunk-based development, feature flags, automated build pipelines, and integration testing strategies.
- Analyze integration failure patterns across teams to identify architectural coupling, test coverage gaps, and process misalignments that cause integration bottlenecks.
- Design a cross-team continuous integration strategy that enables multiple teams to integrate their work frequently and safely with rapid feedback on integration quality.
- Apply trunk-based development practices across multiple teams to reduce integration complexity, shorten feedback cycles, and eliminate long-lived feature branches.
- Analyze test strategy at scale including the test pyramid balance, integration testing approaches, and end-to-end testing trade-offs for multi-team environments.
Shared Definition of Done
- Apply techniques for establishing and evolving a shared Definition of Done across multiple teams that ensures integrated Increments meet a consistent quality standard.
- Analyze the impact of inconsistent Definitions of Done across teams to identify undone work accumulation, technical debt growth, and integration quality risks.
Architecture for agility at scale
- Apply architectural patterns that enable scaling including microservices, event-driven architecture, API-first design, and bounded contexts to reduce inter-team code dependencies.
- Analyze the relationship between software architecture and team structure using Conway's Law to evaluate where architectural refactoring could improve organizational agility.
- Design an architectural runway strategy that balances intentional architecture investment with emergent design, enabling teams to deliver features independently while maintaining system coherence.
Release management at scale
- Apply release management strategies for multi-team environments including release trains, continuous delivery pipelines, and canary deployments that decouple deployment from release.
- Design a release strategy that enables frequent, low-risk releases from multiple teams while maintaining system stability and customer confidence.
6
Domain 6: Metrics for Scaled Environments
4 topics
System-level flow metrics
- Apply system-level flow metrics including end-to-end cycle time, cross-team throughput, integration frequency, and queue wait times to measure scaled delivery effectiveness.
- Analyze flow metric trends to identify systemic bottlenecks, coordination overhead patterns, and capacity imbalances across teams in a scaled environment.
- Design a metrics dashboard for scaled environments that provides visibility into cross-team flow, dependency resolution, and integration health without creating perverse incentives.
- Apply DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, mean time to recover) across scaled environments to measure engineering excellence at the organizational level.
- Analyze the relationship between team-level metrics and portfolio-level outcomes to identify which team behaviors most strongly predict organizational delivery success.
Impediment and dependency tracking
- Apply cross-team impediment tracking practices to make systemic blockers visible, escalate them appropriately, and measure resolution time across organizational boundaries.
- Analyze impediment resolution patterns to identify recurring systemic issues that require organizational intervention rather than team-level workarounds.
Outcome-based measurement
- Apply outcome-based metrics including customer satisfaction, time-to-market, business value delivered, and innovation rate to measure scaling effectiveness beyond output volume.
- Analyze the relationship between scaling structure decisions and business outcomes to evaluate whether multi-team coordination is actually improving customer value delivery.
- Design an evidence-based approach to scaling decisions that uses outcome data to validate or challenge assumptions about the need for additional teams, coordination mechanisms, or structural changes.
Scaling health assessments
- Design a scaling health assessment framework that evaluates team autonomy, integration quality, coordination overhead, and delivery predictability to guide continuous improvement.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Scaling Practitioner (CASP) learning objectives: scaling fundamentals, multi-team coordination, scaling frameworks comparison, organizational design for scale, technical practices for scaling, and metrics for scaled environments.
- Scaling fundamentals including why scaling is necessary, the challenges of multi-team delivery, the distinction between scaling Scrum and scaling agile, and the principles that underpin effective scaling approaches.
- Multi-team coordination including inter-team dependency management, integration strategies, shared backlogs, cross-team events, and techniques for maintaining alignment without centralized control.
- Scaling framework comparison including Nexus, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, and SAFe examining their principles, structures, events, and trade-offs to determine fit for different organizational contexts.
- Organizational design for scaled agile including team topology, product area organization, component versus feature teams, platform strategies, and structural patterns that enable flow at scale.
- Technical practices that enable scaling including continuous integration across teams, shared Definition of Done, architectural runway, feature toggles, and branch-by-abstraction strategies.
- Metrics and transparency for scaled environments including cross-team flow metrics, system-level impediment tracking, integration frequency measures, and portfolio-level delivery visibility.
Not Covered
- Foundational Scrum framework knowledge covered by CSM certification including basic events, artifacts, and accountabilities for single-team Scrum.
- Enterprise transformation strategy and executive coaching covered by CAL2, CTC, and CEC certifications.
- Deep product management, product discovery, and product strategy techniques covered by the Product Owner track.
- Individual team-level facilitation techniques and coaching skills covered by CAF and A-CSM certifications.
- Specific SAFe certification content, PI Planning implementation details, and SAFe role definitions beyond comparative awareness.
- Software engineering fundamentals, language-specific coding practices, and tool-specific DevOps configurations.
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