Exam Tips Flashcards
Tricky Words against agile principles
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
Meaning between words
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
Agile Principles and Practices
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
Self organization is highly valued in Agile
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
Escalation and Discussion with Management
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
Srum, XP and Lean
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
Colocation and Osmotic Communication
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
Traditional vs. Agile
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
Role of the project leader
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
Don’t spend too much time on Alien questions
Don’t spend too much time on questions that do not seem to have been part of your PMI ACP exam prep
Fit the project context
Use Timeboxes to create features
Or
Specific techniques to iteratively refine features
Continuous flow of value to achieve better business outcomes
Lean and the Kanban Method
Agile and Kanban are descendants of lean thinking
Delivering Value
Respect for people
Minimizing waste
Being transparent
Adapting to change
Continuously improving
Agile Methods work well
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
Limits - When both technology and requirements uncertainty are high
Chaotic projects require that one of the uncertainty variables be contained
Project Life Cycles
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
Characteristics of Iterative Life Cycles
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
Characteristics of Incremental Life Cycles
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
Agile Life Cycle
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
Iteration Based Agile
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
Flow Based Agile
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
Servant Leadership
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
Servant Leaders
Servant Leaders facilitate
Sevant Leaders remove organizational impediments
Servant Leaders pave the way for others contribution
Role of the Project manager
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
Collaborate to expedite work
Pairing, Swarming and Mobbing
T-Shaped people. Generalizing specialists.
Product Demonstrations
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.
Execution practices that help the teams deliver value
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
Agile Contracts
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.
