Agile Principles and Mindset

Question 1

What is the Agile manifesto?

Answer 1

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Question 2

What is the Agile Declaration of Interdependence (DOI)?

Answer 2

The declaration of interdependence is a set of six management principles intended for project managers of software development projects:

• increase on ROI
• deliver reliable results
• expect uncertainty
• unleash creativity and innovation -> if you have to fail, fail fast
• boost performance
• improve effectiveness and reliability

Question 3

What are the types of project life cycles?

Answer 3

• Predictive
• Iterative
• Incremental
• Agile

Question 4

What are the three pillars of SCRUM?

Answer 4

• Transparency: a common understanding of what done means
• Inspection: reviewing the results; find causes of variances from project goal
• Adaptation: making adjustments to the scrum process to mitigate problems or bad trends

Question 5

What is the additional question for the regular meeting in Scrum of scrum?

Answer 5

“Will my team put anything in another team’s way?”

Question 6

What is the main difference between Kanban and other agile methods?

Answer 6

There are no “time boxed” iterations

Question 7

What are the core ideas behid Kanban?

Answer 7

• Visualize the workflow
• Limit WIP
• Manage flow
• Make process policies explicit
• Improve collaboratively

Question 8

In Extreme Programming (XP), what are the 5 core values?

Answer 8

• courage
• respect
• simplicity
• feedback
• communication

Question 9

In Extreme Programming (XP), what are the roles?

Answer 9

• Coach
• Customer
• Programmer
• Tester

Question 10

In Extreme Programming (XP), what are some of the best practices?

Answer 10

• Pair programming (development/testing)
• Sustainable pace
• Collective code ownership
• Iteration planning
• Release planning (1 or 2 per year)
• Continuous integration
• Test-driven Development (TDD)
• Refactoring before releasing

Question 11

In Lean, what are the 7 core concepts?

Answer 11

• Eliminate waste
• Empower the team
• Deliver fast
• Optimize the whole
• Build quality
• Defer decisions (make them when we need to make it/ by the people who are more experienced on the subject)
• Amplify learning

Question 12

In Lean, what are the 7 wastes (Poppendieck model)?

Answer 12

• Partially done work
• Extra processes
• Extra features (we do not add “bells and whistles”)
• Task switching
• Waiting
• Motion
• Defects

Question 13

In Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), what are the stages?

Answer 13

• Feasibility study
• Business study
• Functional model iteration (plan, prototype and review)
• Design & build iteration (plan, prototype and review design)
• Implementation (implement, train, document)

Question 14

In Crystal, what do the colors represent?

Answer 14

Customized methodologies.
Each methodology is appropriate for different criticalities and team sizes.
Each project might require a slightly tailored set of policies, practices and processes

Question 15

What are the team stages according to the Bruce Tuckman model?

Answer 15

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

Question 16

In Agile, what are leaders expected to ensure for the sake of the team?

Answer 16

• Transparency through visualization
• Safe environment for experimentation
• Experiment with new techniques and processes
• Share knowledge through collaboration

Question 17

What is a generalizing specialist?

Answer 17

The term “generalizing specialists” has come to mean an individual who has a particular area of deep expertise but also has experience in a large number of other areas that may not be directly related to their core area.

Question 18

What is Progressive elaboration?

Answer 18

Continuously improving and detailing a plan as more detailed and specific information and more accurate estimates become available as the project progresses, and thereby producing more accurate and complete plans that result from the successive iterations of the planning process.

Question 19

In Feature Driven Development (FDD), what are the processes?

Answer 19

• Create a model for the product (predictive)
• Build a feature list and a plan for the work
• Plan by feature
• Design by feature
• Build by feature

Question 20

For what organizations is Feature Driven Development (FDD) specially interesting?

Answer 20

For organizations that are transitioning from waterfall to an iterative approach

Question 21

What does it mean to BE Agile?

Answer 21

Advocate agile principles for the team and stakeholders

• Ensure that everyone has a common understanding of the values and principles of agile
• Support change to make the organization more efficient
• Maintain highly visible team performance indicators to enhance transparency
• Allow the team to make mistakes so they can continuously improve
• Enhance creativity by experimenting new techniques and process ideas
• Encourage knowledge collaboration for risk management
• Encourage emergent leadership and foster self-organization and empowerment
• Practice servant leadership by supporting the team

Question 22

List some of the Agile Scaling frameworks.

Answer 22

• Scrum of Scrums
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)
• Enterprise Scrum
• Disciplined Agile (DA)