CSP-D
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CSP-D
The CSP‑D certification equips senior developers with enterprise‑scale agility, multi‑team coordination, engineering culture leadership, technology strategy, and advanced DevOps reliability skills, enabling them to drive strategic technical outcomes.
Who Should Take This
It is intended for experienced software engineers, lead developers, or technical architects who have already earned the A‑CSD and possess several years of hands‑on delivery in agile environments. These professionals seek to expand their influence across multiple squads, shape engineering culture, and align technology strategy with business goals.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Enterprise Architecture for Agility
2
Domain 2: Multi-Team Technical Coordination
3
Domain 3: Engineering Culture Development
4
Domain 4: Technology Strategy
5
Domain 5: Advanced DevOps and Reliability
6
Domain 6: Developer Professional Excellence
7
Domain 7: Emerging Technology Integration
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
60 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Enterprise Architecture for Agility
3 topics
Evolutionary architecture at scale
- Apply evolutionary architecture principles at enterprise scale including fitness function suites, guided evolution, and architectural quantum identification for bounded contexts.
- Apply domain-driven design strategic patterns including bounded contexts, context mapping, and anti-corruption layers to manage architectural boundaries across teams.
- Analyze architectural coupling patterns across the system to identify tightly coupled components that create cross-team dependencies and hinder independent delivery.
- Design team-aligned architecture strategies where service and component boundaries match team boundaries, enabling independent deployment and reduced coordination overhead.
Architectural governance
- Apply lightweight architectural governance practices that guide technical decisions through principles and standards rather than approval gates and review boards.
- Analyze the tension between architectural consistency and team autonomy to determine governance approaches that maintain system coherence without stifling innovation.
- Design architectural decision-making frameworks that distribute authority to teams while maintaining cross-cutting architectural properties through automated fitness functions.
Event-driven and distributed systems
- Apply distributed systems patterns including event-driven architecture, saga pattern, and distributed transaction management to design resilient multi-service systems.
- Analyze distributed system failure modes including network partitions, cascading failures, and data inconsistency to design appropriate resilience strategies.
- Design data architecture strategies that balance consistency, availability, and partition tolerance requirements across distributed system components.
2
Domain 2: Multi-Team Technical Coordination
3 topics
Shared platform and infrastructure
- Apply internal platform engineering practices to build shared capabilities that enable product teams to deliver independently without duplicating infrastructure work.
- Apply shared library and API design principles to create reusable components with clear versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation strategies.
- Analyze platform team effectiveness by evaluating developer experience, adoption rates, self-service capabilities, and the degree to which the platform reduces team cognitive load.
- Design platform evolution strategies that balance platform team capacity between building new capabilities, maintaining existing services, and supporting product team needs.
Cross-team integration
- Apply cross-team technical coordination practices including architecture guilds, tech radar reviews, and cross-team pairing to maintain technical alignment.
- Analyze integration patterns between teams to identify implicit dependencies, shared state risks, and contract violations that threaten system reliability.
- Design cross-team integration strategies including consumer-driven contracts, shared integration environments, and automated compatibility testing.
- Design API versioning and backward compatibility strategies that enable independent team deployments while maintaining system-wide integration stability.
Technical standards harmonization
- Apply technical standards development processes that engage teams in creating shared coding standards, testing conventions, and operational practices through collaborative consensus.
- Analyze technical standard adoption rates and compliance across teams to identify barriers to adoption and determine whether standards need adjustment or better tooling support.
3
Domain 3: Engineering Culture Development
3 topics
Technical communities of practice
- Apply community of practice design principles to establish cross-team technical communities that share knowledge, develop skills, and advance engineering practices.
- Apply structured learning formats including coding dojos, book clubs, lightning talks, and hackathons to create regular opportunities for skill development and innovation.
- Analyze community of practice health by evaluating participation rates, knowledge output, practice adoption impact, and member satisfaction to sustain community vitality.
- Design organizational learning programs that combine formal training, hands-on practice, mentoring, and community engagement to build engineering capability at scale.
Innovation and experimentation culture
- Apply innovation time practices including hackathons, innovation sprints, and percentage-time allocation to create space for technical exploration and creative problem solving.
- Analyze the impact of engineering culture initiatives on recruitment, retention, code quality, and delivery velocity to demonstrate the business value of culture investment.
- Design psychological safety practices for technical teams that encourage experimentation, learning from failures, and challenging established approaches without career risk.
Engineering metrics and improvement
- Apply DORA metrics including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery to assess organizational engineering maturity.
- Analyze engineering productivity metrics to identify systemic bottlenecks, tool deficiencies, and process overhead that reduce developer effectiveness.
- Design engineering effectiveness improvement programs that target identified bottlenecks through tool investment, process optimization, and capability building.
4
Domain 4: Technology Strategy
2 topics
Technology radar and portfolio
- Apply technology radar practices to evaluate, track, and communicate technology adoption decisions across assess, trial, adopt, and hold categories.
- Apply build-versus-buy analysis frameworks to evaluate technology acquisition decisions considering total cost of ownership, strategic fit, and team capability.
- Analyze technology portfolio health including technology currency, diversity risk, vendor dependency, and skill availability to identify strategic technology risks.
- Design technology investment strategies that balance innovation with stability, managing technology lifecycle transitions to avoid both premature adoption and dangerous stagnation.
- Design technology governance frameworks that balance innovation freedom with portfolio coherence, using principles-based guidance rather than prescriptive mandates.
Technical risk management
- Apply technical risk assessment practices to identify, evaluate, and prioritize technology risks including security vulnerabilities, scalability limits, and single points of failure.
- Analyze technical debt at the organizational level to quantify the cumulative impact on delivery capacity and prioritize strategic debt reduction initiatives.
- Design technical risk mitigation strategies including redundancy, graceful degradation, and incremental modernization that balance risk reduction with delivery continuity.
5
Domain 5: Advanced DevOps and Reliability
3 topics
Site reliability engineering
- Apply SRE principles including service level objectives, error budgets, and toil reduction to balance reliability investment with feature delivery velocity.
- Apply chaos engineering practices to proactively discover system weaknesses through controlled fault injection experiments in production-like environments.
- Analyze production reliability metrics including availability, error rates, and latency distributions to identify systemic reliability issues requiring architectural attention.
- Design reliability improvement programs that establish SLO-based decision frameworks, automate toil, and build reliability engineering capability across development teams.
Production excellence
- Apply blameless postmortem practices to analyze production incidents, identify systemic causes, and implement preventive improvements without assigning individual blame.
- Analyze incident response effectiveness by evaluating detection time, response time, resolution time, and recurrence rates to improve operational resilience.
- Design production readiness standards that teams apply before deployment, covering monitoring, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and graceful degradation strategies.
Security and compliance at scale
- Apply enterprise security architecture practices including zero-trust principles, secret management, and supply chain security to maintain security posture across multiple teams.
- Analyze security posture across the technology portfolio to identify systemic vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and security practice inconsistencies between teams.
- Design organization-wide security programs that embed security practices into development workflows through automation, education, and shared security engineering capability.
6
Domain 6: Developer Professional Excellence
2 topics
Technical mentoring mastery
- Apply technical mentoring practices to develop junior and mid-level developers through structured pairing, code review coaching, and guided learning experiences.
- Analyze developer growth trajectories to design personalized development plans that address individual skill gaps while contributing to team capability objectives.
- Design developer career frameworks that recognize and reward technical depth, mentoring contributions, and engineering leadership alongside traditional management career paths.
- Design technical onboarding programs that rapidly integrate new developers into the team's codebase, practices, and culture through structured learning paths and pairing rotations.
Thought leadership and community
- Apply knowledge dissemination practices to share technical insights, case studies, and engineering innovations through internal and external community engagement.
- Design technical thought leadership strategies that position the engineering organization as a talent magnet through conference presence, open source contribution, and technical blogging.
7
Domain 7: Emerging Technology Integration
2 topics
AI and machine learning integration
- Apply AI-assisted development practices including code generation, automated testing, and intelligent code review to augment developer productivity within Scrum workflows.
- Analyze the impact of AI tools on development workflows, code quality, and team dynamics to determine appropriate adoption strategies and governance boundaries.
- Design AI tool adoption strategies that maximize productivity gains while maintaining code quality, security, and intellectual property compliance.
Technology trend evaluation
- Apply technology trend assessment frameworks to evaluate emerging technologies for organizational relevance, maturity, and potential business impact.
- Analyze the organizational readiness for emerging technology adoption including skill availability, infrastructure requirements, and cultural fit assessment.
- Design technology experimentation programs that enable controlled evaluation of emerging technologies without disrupting production delivery commitments.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance CSP-D learning objectives: mastery-level technical practices, technical leadership across multiple teams, engineering culture development, and organizational technical excellence.
- Enterprise architecture for agility including evolutionary architecture at scale, architectural governance in agile organizations, and technology strategy alignment with business objectives.
- Multi-team technical coordination including shared platform strategies, cross-team integration practices, and technical standards harmonization across development teams.
- Engineering culture cultivation including building learning organizations, fostering innovation, establishing technical communities of practice, and advancing industry-standard engineering practices.
- Technology strategy including build-versus-buy analysis, technology radar management, technical risk assessment, and sustainable technology investment planning.
- Advanced DevOps maturity including site reliability engineering principles, chaos engineering, and production excellence as a shared responsibility.
Not Covered
- Foundational and intermediate engineering practices covered by CSD and A-CSD certifications.
- ScrumMaster and Product Owner track competencies.
- Specific programming language or framework expertise beyond architectural pattern application.
- Detailed infrastructure administration, cloud platform configuration, and vendor-specific tooling.
- Financial management, budgeting, and business strategy beyond technology investment decisions.
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