Exam Tips

Question 1

Tricky Words against agile principles

Answer 1

Assigned - Agile teams work with self organization, not work assignment

Escalate - Agile teams include the product owner and customer

Plan - Agile projects seldom create lots of project management plan upfront

Documentation - create documents that are barely sufficient

Direct, Instruct, Request - Agile teams work by self organization, seldom assume Command and Control

Question 2

Meaning between words

Answer 2

User Story vs. Task
User stories add value, not necessarily true for tasks

Affinity Estimating vs. Relative Sizing
Relative sizing is estimating efforts in relation to other user stories
Afinity sizing is the use of common sizing units to compare task sizes (S,M, L)

Sprint Review vs. Sprint Retrospective
Sprint Review is for demo and validation purposes, involving customers and stakeholders
Sprint Retrospective is for the team members only with the purpose of finding areas of improvement

Question 3

Agile Principles and Practices

Answer 3

Process Tailoring

Many answer choices are feasible. Yet one should consider the answer choices according to the general Agile principles and practices - Select the answer that is general recommendation and practice

Question 4

Self organization is highly valued in Agile

Answer 4

Team members are most important assets for the organization. The success or failure of the project largely depends on the morale and skills of the team

Self organization and team empowerment are a highly favoured concept for Agile teams. Whenever you encounter this term in an anwser choice, you may like to seriously consider the choice as the correct answer

Question 5

Escalation and Discussion with Management

Answer 5

Since Agile highly favours resolving problems and making decisions by the team, “escalation” is considered not recommended except in extreme cases.

When the following phrases appear in an answer choice, the choice is not likely the correct answer

Discuss with senior management

Recommend to senior management

ask management to participate

to be approved by the management

Question 6

Srum, XP and Lean

Answer 6

Mainly focuses on:

Scrum - Roles, Principles, daily standup, sprint review and sprint retrospectives

XP - Roles, principles, practices (refactoring, pair programming and customer review)

Lean - Principles (eliminating waste) and practices

Question 7

Colocation and Osmotic Communication

Answer 7

Team members working on the same project are highly recommended to be co-located within the same room to reap the benefits of Osmotic communication

Osmotic, Communication and Colocation are likely to be correct

Question 8

Traditional vs. Agile

Answer 8

The following word choices may not be correct:

Change Management

Create a Plan, Amend a Plan

Assign Tasks

Scope Creep

Escalation

Report and Documentation

Baseline

Monte Carlo, Regression Analysis

Question 9

Role of the project leader

Answer 9

A project leader should function more like a facilitator and work to ensure that Agile practices are followed

Whenever the project leader find some team members disrupting, it is best advised to wait for the team to collaborate to resolve the issue within the team first rather than talking directly to those problematic team members

The answer usually favours resolving within the team with a participatory decision model

Question 10

Don’t spend too much time on Alien questions

Answer 10

Don’t spend too much time on questions that do not seem to have been part of your PMI ACP exam prep

Question 11

Fit the project context

Answer 11

Use Timeboxes to create features

Or

Specific techniques to iteratively refine features

Continuous flow of value to achieve better business outcomes

Question 12

Lean and the Kanban Method

Answer 12

Agile and Kanban are descendants of lean thinking

Delivering Value

Respect for people

Minimizing waste

Being transparent

Adapting to change

Continuously improving

Question 13

Agile Methods work well

Answer 13

Iterative, incremental and Agile projects work well for projects that involve new or novel tools, techniques, materials or application domain

Also for projects that require R&D

Have high rates of change

Have unclear or unkown requirements, uncertainty or risk

Have a final goal that is hard to describe

Question 14

Limits - When both technology and requirements uncertainty are high

Answer 14

Chaotic projects require that one of the uncertainty variables be contained

Question 15

Project Life Cycles

Answer 15

Predictive - A more traditional approach with the bulk of the planning occuring upfront, and execution in a single pass

Iterative - An approach that allows feedback for unfinished work to improve and modify that work

Incremental - An approach that provides finished deliverables that the customer may be able to use immediately

Agile - An approach that is both iterative and incremental to refine work items and deliver frequently

Question 16

Characteristics of Iterative Life Cycles

Answer 16

When complexity is high, project incurs frequent changes or when the scope is subject to different stakeholder views of the final product

Successive prototypes or POC

Each prototype yields customer feedback

Team incorporates new information by repeating one or more project activities in teh next cycle

Iterations help identify and reduce uncertainty

Question 17

Characteristics of Incremental Life Cycles

Answer 17

Frequent delivery of smaller deliverables

Optimized for speed of delivery

Optimize for delivering value to sponsors or customers more often that a single final product

Plan for initial deliverables before beginning work

Begin working on first delivery as soon as possible

As the project continues, the team may deviate from the original vision

Degree of change and variation is less important than ensuring customers get value sooner than at the end of the project

Deliver the product and value incrementally

Question 18

Agile Life Cycle

Answer 18

Incremental and Iterative.. But in Agile, incremental delivery uncovers hidden or misunderstood requirements

Iteration based Agile - Each timebox is the same size. Each timebox results in working tested features

Flow-Base Agile - It takes time to complete a feature and a feature and it is not the same time for each feature

Question 19

Iteration Based Agile

Answer 19

Team works in iterations (timeboxes of equal duration) to deliver completed features

The team works on the most important feature, collaborating as a team to finish it.

Then, the team works on the next most important feature and finishes it

The team may decide to work on a few features at a time, but the team does not address all of the work for the iteration at once

Question 20

Flow Based Agile

Answer 20

The team pulls features from the backlog based on its capacity to start work, rather than on an iteration based schedule.

The team defines its workflow with columns on a task board and manages the work in progress for each column.

Each feature may take a different amount of time to finish

Teams work in progress sizes small in order to better identify issues early and reduce rework should changes be required

The team and business stakeholders determine the most appropriate schedule for planning, product reviews and retrospectives

Question 21

Servant Leadership

Answer 21

Purpose - Why we are doing this project, optimize at the team level

People - Encourage the team to create an environment where everyone can succeed

Process - Do not plan on following the perfect agile process. Look for results to demonstrate agility

Question 22

Servant Leaders

Answer 22

Servant Leaders facilitate

Sevant Leaders remove organizational impediments

Servant Leaders pave the way for others contribution

Question 23

Role of the Project manager

Answer 23

Cross functional teams coordinate their own work and collaborate with the business representative

Emphasis on coaching people, fostering greater collaboration and aligning stakeholders needs

As a servant leader, project managers encourage the distribution of responsibility to the team; to those people who have the knowledge to get work done

Question 24

Collaborate to expedite work

Pairing, Swarming and Mobbing

Answer 24

T-Shaped people. Generalizing specialists.

Question 25

Product Demonstrations

Answer 25

Iteration based agile - demonstrates all completed work at the end of an iteration.

Flow based agile - The team demonstrates completed work when it is time to do so, usually when enough features have accumulated into a set that is coherent.

Question 26

Execution practices that help the teams deliver value

Answer 26

Continuous Integration

Test at all levels (system, unit, integration, smoke, regression

Acceptance Test Driven Development - Just enough code to meet the acceptance criteria

Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development - Test drive the teams designs

Question 27

Agile Contracts

Answer 27

Multi-tiered structure - Schedules and SOW’s

Emphasize Value Delivered - Milestones and payments structured based on value-driven deliverables

Fixed-price increments - Microdeliverables ex. user stories. More control over how the money is spent. Supplier limits financial risk over commitment to a single deliverable

Not to exceed time and materials - Introduce new ideas and innovation. Replacing original work with new work

Graduated Time and Materials - Higher rate when delivery is earlier vs. lower rate with late

Early Cancellation Option - Allows the customer to buy the remainder of the project for a cancellation fee. Client limits financial exposure and the supplier earns some revenue for features no longer required

Dynamic Scope Option - Vary project scope at specified points in the project.

Team Augmentation - Most collaborative contracting approach.

Favour full service suppliers - Reduce dependencies.