Leadership basics

Question 1

What are the key value areas from the scrum.org evidence based management framework?

Answer 1

They are:

1. current value - measures value delivered to customer today
2. unrealised value - measures value that could be realised by meeting all potential needs of the customer or user
3. ability to innvoate: measures the ability to deliver a new capabiliti that might better serve customer or user need
4. time to market: measures the ability to quickly deliver new capability, service or product

Question 2

What are the four key values of the agile manifesto?

Answer 2

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Question 3

What are the 12 Agile manifesto key principles?

Answer 3

1. The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile prorcesses harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout a project
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a scrum team is F2F conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
10. Simplicity - the art of maximising the amount of work not done - is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

Question 4

Charles is a very hands-on PO. He writes requirements and tests product himself once development is done. He has told the team how much work will need to be completed in the next iteration based on his vision, experience and skill. In this scanario:

1. the iteration planning process is proceeding smoothly
2. Charles is overstepping his role
3. Charles is taking over the SM’s repsonsibilities
4. The team should claim more responsibility for planning in the next retro

Answer 4

2

Question 5

What are some of the benefits of self-organisation?

Answer 5

1. team buy-in and shared ownership
2. motivation, which leads to an enhanced performance level of the team
3. innovative and creative environment conducive to growth
4. increased self-accountability, commitment to achieving goals of the scrum team

Question 6

What are the five tasks of an agile leader?

Answer 6

1. Practice transparency through visualisation
2. Create a safe environment for experimentation
3. Experiment with new techniques and processes
4. Share knowledge through collaboration
5. Encoruage emergent leadership via a safe environment

Question 7

You have been assigned to lead a distributed agile team. To help them communicate, the best option would be to?

1. Ask them to share photos of themselves
2. Document a common language for all project comms
3. Set up initial f2f meetings so everyone can meet each other
4. Define a common working hours so everyone can better communicate

Answer 7

3

Question 8

Benefits of an agile approach (choose all that apply):

1. Quick feedback, quickly adapting to change, resulting in more customer satisfaction.
2. short increments reducing complexity
3. short increments increasing predictability
4. all of the above

Answer 8

1 and 3

Question 9

A company located in boston has very small conference rooms and not all team members can be in the same room. What are they likely to experience?

1. more comms challenges
2. higher levels of conflict
3. more privacy
4. less difficulty reaching convergence

Answer 9

1.

Question 10

How is risk related to value delivery?

Answer 10

Risk reduces value delivery, it can be considered the opposite of value since risks or threats to the project have the potential to erode, remove or reduce value if they occur.

Question 11

In an agile project delivery what is fixed and what can vary?

Answer 11

Time and cost is fixed but scope can vary.

Question 12

What is the primary benefit of an Agile approach?

Answer 12

To enable a team to inspect and adapt their results by delivering a working product.

Question 13

What is the most important thing for your agile team to continuously focus on? (Choose one)

1. Getting the right answers
2. Understanding their tasks
3. Defining their tasks
4. Measuring their performance

Answer 13

2

Question 14

Which of the following shows that the Scrum team is doing well?

1. Team working at the expected velocity
2. Team has releasable product every release
3. Team is meeting the sprint goals
4. Team works over the weekends

Answer 14

3. (there should be a valuable product at the end of every sprint, not releaseble and not necessarily every release)

Question 15

A company is at the beginning od adopting scrum. Tehy should spread team members across the teams so that they can maintain high utilisationof resources.
True or faulse

Answer 15

False

Question 16

How can a product’s time to market be improved?

Answer 16

Reducing features in a release shortens the effort and complexity of the release (reducing bugs), committing team members to only one team at a time and co-locating teams improves the ability of the team to docus and conitnuously integrate reducing manual effort and improving consistency.

Question 17

Whose responsibility is it to create an environment where agility is supported and also help remove impediments to delivering done products?

1. Agile leader
2. PO
3. PM
4. SM

Answer 17

1

Question 18

An org has just started implementing scrum. SM’s have been hired to make the transition succesfully. SMs should shielf the Scrum teams from change and unceriainty created by those who not yet understand agile

1. True
2. False

Answer 18

2

Question 19

What is the customer usage index?

Answer 19

It’s a measurement of usage by feature to help infer

1. The degree to which customers find the product useful
2. Whether the actual usage meets expectations on how long users should be taking to use the feature

Question 20

Synchorising the release schedules across multiple teams will:

1. Increase frequency of delivery
2. Increase productivity
3. Reduce dependency
4. Help deliver the increment in time
5. None of the above

Answer 20

Synchronising release schedules does not guarantee improved productivity. Decreasing dependencies between teams will improve autonomy and localised decision-making

Question 21

What is the amount of time when an idea is proposed or a hypothesis is formed until a customer can benefit from that idea?

Answer 21

lead time

Question 22

What is time to learn?

Answer 22

Total time needed to sketch an idea or improvement, build it and deliver it to users and learn from their usage.

Question 23

What is the primary benefit of an agile approach?

Answer 23

Enable a team to inspect and adapt the results to deliver customer value in small increments based on what we know.

Question 24

What are the main roles of a PO?

Answer 24

Visionary, collaborator, customer representative, decision-maker, experimenter and influencer

Question 25

What are the down-sides of having multiple PO’s?

Answer 25

1. With multiple pOs they focus on detailed stories instead of value creation (contract negotiation game)
2. Domain knowledge becomes concetrated on POs which reduces it in teams and PO’s become focused on problem-solving and team on execution of tasks
3. Unclear responsibility and ownership
4. Stimulate part-time jobs by adding the PO work to someone’s existing workload and introducing conflict of interest. Multiple people working part-time on one product doesnt help things get better.

Question 26

What are SM’S roles?

Answer 26

An impediment remover, facilitator, coach, teacher, servant leader, manager, change agent, mentor

Question 27

One of the scrum teams has requested hiring additional team members in order to improve their ability to deliver. As the department’s manager, what is your best response?

Answer 27

Self-organised teams choose how to best accomplish their work rather than being directed by others outside of the team. As a leader provide the team with guidelines and assistance. Allow the team members to decide who would best fit their current team within the provided guidelines and provide the support needed.

Question 28

What does time to market express?

Answer 28

The organisation’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services or products.

Question 29

What are the benefits of cross-functional teams?

Answer 29

1. Team members step outside of their comfort zone to do their best
2. Less dependency on individual members
3. Reduces external dependencies
4. Increases the opportunity of delivering value to the users
5. Team members will develop and grow their individual skills.

Question 30

You are an agile leader and one of the scrum teams require a new environment to perform security testing. Current policy dictates that these are only available for production pruposes. WHich two would be the best strategies to manage?

1. As a leader youre responsible for supporting the team in what they need. You should work with senior management to get this enviornment approved.
2. The team should do security testing in their existing dev environment trying to replicate production environment as much as possible. Work with the scrum team to make sure that htye don’t face any issues upfront.
3. Add additional time to the end of the sprint to focus on security testing. This way an environment for security isn’t needed.
4. Ask devs to come up with different alternate solutions to resolve this issue themselves. You as the leader will make sure you support htem as needed

Answer 30

2 & 4

Question 31

The agile manifesto states that highest priority is to satisfy the customer. if the PO need to build features of less or no valuen in the product that’s ok as long as it provides values to the customer
True or False

Answer 31

False - the highest priority is to satisfy the customer thrugh early and continuous delivery of valuable software.