Practice Test Flashcards
What can be termed as the Agile triangle?
Agile projects deal with the basic triangle of Value, Quality and Constraints. Scope, Cost and Time represent the constraints.
Which phases can be observed in a project management framework applying the Agile mindset?
Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, Close
The team is working on a project based on a Fixed price contract and is using Agile methodologies. Midway through the project, the customer requested for a change. What should you do?
If the customer requires a change, there is no point in telling them it is not possible, but rather try to work out a way in which it can be accommodated. Given the fact that it is a Fixed Price contract, you cannot simply accept the change at no cost to the customer– it would open a Pandora’s box. Deferring to management may be a tempting option, but before doing so, it seems that the team would have to do some homework. In an Agile team, the team can always substitute a feature with another as long as the team has not started working on it. But if a feature is already delivered or being worked on, then it cannot be changed unless there is a reciprocal action by the customer.
What are the 5 levels in the hierarchy of conflicts?
Level-1 means the team discovers a problem;
Level-2 means disagreement comes to the fore;
Level-3 means disagreement degenerates to contest (generalizations, formation of groups);
Level-4 means crusade (open warfare between groups);
Level-5 means World war (all hell breaks loose).
What is Time to market?
Time to market is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. The reason that time to market is so important is because being late erodes the addressable market that you have to sell your product into.
A product development company is concerned about improving the time-to-market for it’s products and is adopting Agile for faster turnaround. What should be the basis for prioritizing features in such a scenario?
Time-to-market is often a critical parameter for realizing value. In order to reach the market quicker, number of features may have to be compromised, so also the extent to which they are implemented.
A Product manager needs to find out who is working a specific task, in order to provide some valuable information. Where can she find this information?
During the Sprint planning session, the Sprint backlog will be created and embellished with information such as break-down of stories into tasks, assignment of tasks to team members,etc.
A team is estimating the amount of work required to complete work on a user story using the ideal time unit. In the context of Agile estimating, what is Ideal time?
Ideal time is the amount of “work time” that it would take to complete a story. This may be then correlated to the actual time to be estimated, based upon the level of expertise, the amount of distraction, etc. The concept of ideal time allows us to not worry about these other variables while sizing a story.
A Product owner is proposing a new product to be built that addresses an important need felt in the Telecom industry. Such software might best be referred to as what?
Horizontal market software is applicable across different industry segments. Vertical market software is applicable for a particular industry. Since the product in question is being developed for a specific industry, Vertical market software is the best choice.
What is the difference between Enterprise Software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)?
Enterprise software is software your organization buys and installs on your organization’s servers. By contrast, SaaS software is software that you “rent” and is hosted “in the cloud” and accessed via the internet. In addition and significantly, SaaS offerings tend to be multi-tenant, meaning that multiple organizations are actually working in the same database.
A team is considering many options in terms of team formation, including co-located teams, virtual teams, offshoring, near-shoring, etc. The over-arching goal for this team is time-to-market. Other things being constant, what guidance can you provide regarding the comparison of time-to-market for co-located teams as opposed to dispersed teams?
Time-to-market improves 3-fold if the team is co-located. Ref: Agile software development - a cooperative game: Alastair Cockburn.
A product owner wants to introduce a new feature in a product as she believes it will bring in incremental revenue. What is incremental revenue?
Incremental revenue means finding ways to get more revenue out of the existing customer base (by up-selling, or upgrading or offering more value).
An Agile team needs to establish a fine balance between bringing in a new process and adapting a process to suit the particular requirements of the project. What is the difference between process tailoring and process instantiation?
Process tailoring is one of the foundational elements of Agile. You start out with a process and tailor it to how it best fits your team and its particular situation. Process instantiation on the other hand takes a (often heavy and prescriptive) process and implements it with little or no scope for adaptation.
A customer for a project team has signed off on the requirements and would like the team to follow Agile methods for development. The customer representatives are apparently in a very busy period and cannot make time for attending planning and demo meetings. What is the best way to proceed?
Make 5 minute recorded demos of completed features and submit to the customer for offline viewing and feedback.
Feedback (inspect and adapt) is an important tenet of Agile development and should not be compromised. If availability of time is an issue, workarounds may be adopted.
What are the 5 core risk areas for a project?
Intrinsic schedule flaw, Specification breakdown, Scope creep, Personnel loss and Productivity variation.
A development team, along with the customer representatives and other stakeholders are in a week long meeting to determine the content and outline of the forthcoming product release. What is the most appropriate name for this meeting?
The Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS) is a “look ahead’ planning session that is conducted to come up with a forecast for a release plan
An organization wants to establish the notion of “Self-organized” teams. What best describes the term “Self-Organized” in Agile?
A team that accepts accountability for delivering on its commitments.
A company is trying to transition to Agile and is looking for a suitable project to pilot the transition. Which one would be the MOST suitable for the pilot?
- 3 weeks
- 3 months
- 1 year
- 9 months
3 months. A medium duration project is best suited for the pilot. Too short may open criticism that the method will only work with smaller projects. Too long, and it will take a lot of time to see results.
A team worked on a story during an iteration and declared that a particular story meets the definition of ready. What can be said about a user story that meets the “Definition of ready”?
A “ready story” is one that is ready to be worked upon and taken up for planning. It means initial discussion has taken place between the product owner and the team
A team committed to implement 10 stories in an iteration. Development work is completed on the stories. Functional tests have been completed and basic regression tests pass. There are 12 defects pending on few of the stories that block few paths in the use cases defined. Defects have been fixed but they have not been re-tested. In such a scenario, can the Iteration be deemed successful?
No. The idea in an iteration is to complete all the engineering activities necessary to produce a product of “near releasable” quality. This has not happened, so the iteration cannot be termed as successful
You are working on a large project, that will be executed using Agile methodologies. How would you staff the team for such a project?
While it is true that Agile prefers smaller teams, the team size ought to be determined by the complexity and nature of the project. A larger project can be handled by multiple Agile teams working in parallel. Some methodologies like FDD can actually scale up to as high as 250 people.
The product owner is assigning priorities for stories in the product backlog. There are many parameters based on which the priorities get decided and the product owner is getting confused. Which is the best criterion (or set of criteria) that can be used for assigning priorities?
ROL (Risk of Loss) and risk. The best answer is RoI and Risk. Higher the RoI from a story, the higher would be its priority. Similarly higher risk items should have a higher priority. Stakeholder’s perceptions may play a role, but it is always better to have a dispassionate view based on these parameters. It should certainly not be a consensus exercise or a majority wins exercise (number of requesters).
Tim, Janet and Daisy disagree on the estimate for a story. Tim is the Product owner and knows about the business relevance of the story more than anybody else. Janet is a very experienced developer and the lead for the development team. She has worked on several similar stories in the past. Daisy is about 6 months old in the project and has been assigned to work on the story. Whose estimate should be used during Sprint planning?
A product owner should not ideally participate in the estimation. An expert’s opinion is valuable and must be considered, but in the event of a disagreement, the estimate of the person who is going to do the actual work should be respected.
A team is working on sprint planning. The stories were broken down into tasks and the tasks need to be assigned to the team members. Which is the best unit of estimate for the tasks that can help in this exercise?
Tasks are usually estimated in terms of hours taken to complete. There is no such thing as task points.
A SPIKE solution is undertaken in order to gain better understanding about a new technology or concept before starting work related to it. In which phase of an Agile project is it most appropriate to undertake SPIKE stories?
SPIKE is an activity that helps during design and development in gaining a quick understanding about a technology by doing some small, targeted experimentation.
A team is adopting a Kanban system and is designing the Kanban card and Kanban board. There is a lot of debate about what information should be included on the Kanban card and it is agreed to keep the information to a bare minimum to avoid cluttering the board. Which information would be MOST valuable on a Kanban card?
While all information is useful, the name of the person working on it would be the MOST valuable. The other information can be maintained somewhere else (e.g. on an electronic system) and cross-referenced
As a manager of an Agile team, you provide a reward to the testers in the team based on the number of test cases each of them produce. Is this a good practice?
Metrics have to be targeted to achieve the right behavior of the team. The goal of the entire team should be to achieve near releasable quality at the end of the iteration. Adding to test case volume by itself does not lead to better quality – in fact it might be perverse incentive to do meaningless tests in order to bolster the number of tests developed and executed.
A team member wants to bring up an improvement suggestion. Implementing it would require an organization-wide change. Which is the most appropriate meeting in which to bring up this suggestion?
Improvements that require cross-organizational involvement should be left for the release retrospective, because typically it requires more effort and lobbying that cannot be accomplished in a single iteration. The daily scrum is certainly not a forum for discussing such changes and there is no such forum as a monthly meeting.
A Product Manager in an organization is trying to understand what it would take to transition into a Product Owner role. What is the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner?
In general, the Product Manager focuses more on the external stakeholders and tries to reflect their view-point in the roadmap. A Product Owner has both an inward and outward focus. The Outward focus is like that of the Product Manager, and the inward focus calls upon the PO to work with the team in order to plan the iterations and the releases and therefore build a roadmap with team input.
What is SWOT analysis?
SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) gives an idea about the competitive position of a product.
In the Feature-Driven-Development methodology, there is no fixed length for an iteration. The duration of the iteration is driven primarily by what?
The time necessary to finish the feature. FDD teams work on a feature at a time. Once that feature is completed, they disband and start working on another feature
The Risk-burndown-chart plots the level of risk on a project over time to indicate if the project’s riskiness is increasing or decreasing over a period of time. What is plotted on the Y-axis of the chart?
Level of risk is commonly measured as the sum of the product of the likely impact and the probability. By summing the level of risk on all the identified risks on a project, a project manager can get a numeric indicator for the “riskiness” of a project.
Why is “Beeing 100% sure of meeting the goal” NOT a legitimate concern in determining the Goal of an iteration?
Levelled workload, priorities set by the PO and team buy-in are important. No team can be 100% sure of meeting the goal all the time
What is a product persona?
A persona description should indicate clearly the role a person is playing in the story, how they interact with the system and what their special needs might be. It allows the developers to get into the persona and understand real and perceived needs.
Ex.: “Mary is a front desk clerk handles 200 customer’s cash transactions a day and wants the system to be very quick and responsive”
A team has just finished estimating the stories in terms of ideal days and is trying to figure out how to translate this into the actual (elapsed) days. As an Agile coach, what would you suggest is the percentage of the total time worked by a developer is actually programming time?
Normally developers spend 55% of their time on actual programming tasks.
The manager of a Product team is working towards a critical product release. The team is split up into multiple Scrum teams working on different areas of the product. What is the BEST approach to form each of the participating Scrum teams?
A Scrum team needs to be as cross-functional as possible - and a feature team is most likely to meet this requirement
“Time traveling” is a practice used for de-bugging in Extreme programming. What does this entail?
Time-traveling is going back to previous versions to discover the genesis of a defect.
Although Agile teams embrace change, they also need to project a clear roadmap for the product. What is the normal time frame for which a “roadmap” is defined?
A roadmap is typically over multiple releases (up to 2 years).
An Agile coach in the context of Agile planning advocated the technique of triangulation for estimation. What is the best description of triangulation?
Instead of relying on just one benchmark, triangulating advocates using multiple benchmarks to ensure that the story is sized correctly relative to others.
Having well thought through and reliable estimates is an important foundation for planning. What type of estimation is most commonly used in Agile projects?
Top-down estimation is commonly used in Agile. Analogous estimation is considered top-down.
During a daily stand-up meeting, one of the team members brought up a blocking issue and another team member interrupts and starts describing how to resolve that issue. What should the Team Facilitator do?
One of the benefits of the Daily stand-up is that it enhances visibility to the blocking issues and it is a good thing that another team member is willing to step in and solve the issue - no need for a reprimand. However, the daily stand-up needs to move along at a brisk pace and hence the Team Facilitator should request that the resolution discussion be taken offline.
A team is working on release planning and is estimating the proposed release backlog. Whose opinion should be considered while finalizing estimates for a story?
It is important to have as broad a consensus as possible within the team about an estimate, hence Agile advocates arriving at estimates in a collaborative fashion. The person who has maximum expertise may tend to assign a low estimate, which may not be enough for a less experienced team member. The developer assigned to the story may not have expertise to properly assess. Hence everybody needs to have a say in the estimation.
What is a Niko-Niko calendar?
A Niko-niko Calendar is updated daily with each team member’s mood for that day. Over time the calendar reveals patterns of change in the moods.
“Delivering value early” is an important principle for an Agile team. However, each stakeholder’s perception of value might be different. The “Value” of a feature should be measured from whose perspective?
The user and the buyer are both important stakeholders. The buyer is the person paying the money for the system. The user is the one spending time using the system. Their notion of value is the one which matters the most. The Product Owner needs to look at each feature from their point of view.
At the end of two iterations, your team figures out that it has grossly under-estimated the time required for the project. What is the BEST way to address this situation?
The best way forward is to adapt to the new understanding of reality and re-evaluate the plans for the project. In Agile, the plan is fairly flexible and changeable from iteration to iteration.
What are the layers in an Agile enterprise framework?
- Portfolio governance
- Project Management
- Iteration management
- Technical practices
A particular team is observing that its backlog of escaped defects (defects escaped from the team and discovered by the customer) is increasing over a period of time. What is the BEST remedy for this situation?
Spending more time on hardening or adding testers or root cause analysis of defects are all reactive measures. The most likely cause of escaped defects is that the team is accepting too much in the iteration or release than it can deliver with reasonable quality. Therefore reducing the amount of work is the only pro-active measure and hence the best option.
An HR team wants to modify the key performance areas for different designations in an organization which has recently transitioned to Agile methods. Which of the following should be the primary performance goal of an Agile Project Manager?
The emphasis in Agile is to deliver maximum business value.
In a release planning session the team decided to fix the time and resources up-front, while trying to project how much work will get done in a given time period. The Project manager gave the following data. The average velocity over the past 8 iterations was 33. The average velocity of the worst 3 iterations was 28. The average velocity of the best 3 iterations was 37. What would be the best statement to make about how much functionality can be accommodated in 5 iterations?
In fixed date planning, you project a “will have” set of features based on worst velocity and a set of “might have” features based on the best velocity.
One of the issues that a project manager normally faces is that an estimate quickly gets converted into a firm commitment. What is the BEST way to prevent this from happening?
Estimates inherently have variability in them, whereas a commitment is firm and unshakable. While providing estimates, it is always advisable to provide a range so that the process of converting estimates into a commitment (and a plan) is more organized.
Two types of buffers commonly used for providing for uncertainties during planning are Feature buffers and Schedule buffers. What is the best use of Feature buffer?
The idea behind using feature buffers is to state clearly during planning that the team will certainly deliver a basic set of features (based on a pessimistic assumption of the velocity) whereas other features are designated as likely but not a firm commitment.
The testers on a team are obviously dissatisfied with their transition to Agile. They are not able to keep up with the developers because as they developers build new code, the testers need to not only test the new functionality, but also perform regression tests. Running these tests takes a long time, and they are simply unable to complete those during the iteration time frame. This results in pressure and unsatisfactory quality from iteration to iteration. Which measure will make the biggest difference in improving this situation?
Having a healthy set of automated regression tests is of immense value in an Agile team. Therefore, if automated tests do not exist, it is prudent to invest in developing automation.
A senior technical lead within the development team is worried that the design of the system is not finalized yet and hence the estimates for the work involved have a high degree of uncertainty. According to the theory of the cone of uncertainty what is the normal range of actual values from the initial estimate?
According to the cone of uncertainty, the actual would come in between 60% and 160% of the initial estimate.
An agile project manager is worried about the likelihood of personnel turnover which might affect the ability of the team to deliver on its commitments. What is the key factor that helps in mitigating the impact of attrition risk?
Fostering collective ownership is the only option that addresses mitigation of IMPACT, i.e. how do you reduce the impact of the event if it does happen. Other options address mitigation of probability.
A Project manager has determined the constraints on a project and is classifying them as Fixed, Flexible or Accept. What is this artifact that he is producing?
One way of looking at constraints to put them a Trade-Off Matrix, where the constraints would be either “Fixed”, i.e. unchangeable (e.g. a hard deadline), “Flexible” (e.g. release as soon as we can deliver a certain set of features) or “Accept” (e.g. no matter how much it costs). It gives a clearer picture about how the project manager handles the various trade-off decisions on the project.
A team facilitator is planning to conduct a planning poker session for estimating a bunch of stories and is estimating the amount of time that the session will take. How many rounds of voting should she plan for, for each story?
You would hope that you reach consensus in a “few” – as in 2 or 3 rounds at most, but you would continue the discussion as long as it takes to drive towards that consensus and so far as the discussion is adding value in terms of clarifying the story or the approach in completing the story.
In an Agile team, a set of developers are finding it hard to arrive at the right approach to design an interface for a use case. They set up a meeting with some customer representatives to clarify the approach. What do you think about this approach?
Direct contact of the team with the customer is a good thing. The product owner is the custodian of the backlog (requirements), but he should not try to be the single point of contact (or the bottleneck) for such discussions. Getting customer input during review may be too late (being reactive) and more documentation may not really help as much as an interactive discussion.
A trading software has very stringent performance requirements, which requires experimenting with different deployment architectures to come up with performance related recommendations. Where would you find the details of such requirements?
All kinds of requirements (including performance related requirements) need to be explicitly added to the product backlog. It is not advisable that they remain hidden in the performance test plan or the architecture or design document.
What are some objectives for an agile project management framework?
Objectives for an Agile project management framework could be: Continuous innovation, Product adaptability, Reduced delivery schedules, People and process adaptability, Reliable results. Agile emphasizes flexibility in planning and hence does not believe baselines are sacrosanct.
A Product Owner is on vacation for a few weeks. Who is responsible to guide the team during the Sprint Planning meetings at this time?
It is the responsibility of the Scrum Master to ensure that the Product Owner gives a subset of the backlog for consideration by the team while he is away.
A team is transitioning to Scrum and is debating which person would be in the best position to be the Scrum Master for a Scrum team?
- Most popular person on the team
- Manager with formal authority
- The team lead
- The PM, in a MATRIX organization
The Scrum Master is not necessarily the technical expert and ideally should not be a Manager with formal authority. Being Scrum Master is not a test of the popularity of a person. The Scrum Master serves the team by coordinating their activities, removing blocks, etc. and in this respect the Project Manager in a matrix organization seems to be the best fit.
To prevent cross-talk during the Daily stand-up meetings, the Scrum Master bought a baton, which would be passed around the team. At any point in time, only the person holding the baton can talk, others cannot interrupt. In light of the philosophy of communication in Agile teams, is this a good practice?
Yes. In the daily stand-up meeting, cross-talk and side conversations should be kept to a minimum.
Ideally each team member assigned to an Agile team should be full time. However, some shared team members may not have enough work to be full time. In case a team member is assigned to multiple teams, they need to make use of time slicing. What is Time-slicing?
Time-slicing involves working on multiple tasks in a given time period, but there has to be discipline that at any given point in time, you provide undivided attention to one of the tasks. Also, while doing task switching, you should bring the task at hand to a logical point before switching so that you don’t have to start from scratch each time.
A product owner undertaking prioritization of user stories is worried that all the priorities are being assigned through gut feel methods. She would like to get some kind of a numeric basis for the priorities so assigned. Which method should be helpful to get a numeric basis?
Karl Wiegers relative weighting method provides for a system of assigning numeric weights and a formula to capture priorities and ranks
In an Agile project, who is responsible for identification, monitoring and control of risks?
Many Agile methodologies provide for a project manager role. One of his responsibilities would be to manage the risks on a project.
A developer discovers a unique approach to resolve a technical issue that could help many of the other team members. What should he do?
A developer who discovers something of generic value should describe to everybody in the team as quickly as possible. It is not the purpose of the stand-up or the retrospective meeting to discuss specific techniques. The team lead should not be viewed as the bureaucratic authority who needs to be taken into confidence for every technical issue.
Exploratory testing is usually one of the last steps in the quality control of product. The term Exploratory testing refers to what?
XP integrates the testing of the feature into the development process (through test-driven-development). When a feature is marked as “Done” (referred to as done-done), then some exploratory tests may be performed to try out some basic use cases to make sure the core functionality is working.
Considering the disproportionate cost of defect fixing, more and more teams are moving towards Test-First-Development and Test-Driven-Development methods in order to prevent the introduction of defects. What is the primary difference between the Test-First-Development (TFD) and Test-Driven-Development (TDD)?
TDD = TFD + refactoring.
In order to capture all the risks on a project, the team facilitator decided to conduct a risk census. What is a risk census?
A risk census enlists all the risks associated with a given project.
During the implementation of a user story, the developer and tester came up with conflicting interpretations. The developer insists that the software is working as specified, whereas the tester believes this is not going to meet user expectations. How could this situation be avoided?
If the team had stories with clear acceptance criteria, the tester and the developer would have jointly interpreted them, which would have avoided the misunderstanding and disconnect between testing and development.
While implementing Continuous integration, it is observed that a set of automation tests take too long to execute and it slows down the build and integration process. What should be done in this case?
Running automated tests is a critical part of the Continuous integration process and is required to ensure that the changes being committed are not breaking the integrity of the system. Therefore, if the tests are taking too long, one should pause and address the root cause rather than try to work around the problem.
A Scrum team has failed to meet its Sprint commitments by a long way. The primary cause was a wrong design decision taken by two of the members assigned to a core story. As a Scrum Master, what should be your approach during the Sprint retrospective?
The retrospective is a forum for the team to reflect and come up with corrective actions. The Scrum Master should not dictate or lead the team to do things in a certain way. It is simply to make the issue visible and then trust the team to do the right things.
What is Relative weighting (Karl Wiegers model) ?
Relative weighting (Karl Wiegers model) -> Wiegers Prioritization Matrix -> five different components:
- item set: The items that are being evaluated for the prioritization effort
- criteria: The varying criteria that will be used to evaluate each item.
- value scales: Scale of possible values that can be used to specify the relationship of an item to the criteria being evaluated
- weighting: The relative weighting applied to each criteria
- formula: The formula selected to generate a priority
- value for each item based on the Criteria and Weightings
Which term best describes an Agile project’s approach to risk analysis? and why?
- Pareto
- Regression
- Monte Carlo
- Qualitative
Monte Carlo.
Monte Carlo simulations are used to model the probability of different outcomes in a process that cannot easily be predicted due to the intervention of random variables. It is a technique used to understand the impact of risk and uncertainty in prediction and forecasting models.
In XP, what is customer test?
Customer tests are done by having customers develop acceptance tests. These tests determine the overall performance and behavior of the system. Customers create them for every story they request. The team behind the system will run these tests to measure the progress in developing that system. The team leader tracking development maintains a graph outlining the performance of the system over time.
While writing these tests, an extreme programming team may have a programmer or tester work with the customer. However, the customer owns the tests. While doing the tests, the customer assists in specifying the requirements. Hence, for this practice to be a success, the system has to be testable, and this is one of the demands it should meet.
At a strategic level, what is the most appropriate way for an Agile team to estimate a project?
Using an abstract measurement to estimate Product Backlog Items.
In a vision meeting, the vision for the project is defined and presented by whom?
The customer.
What do project reports show during the Sprint review meeting?
ROI
When facilitated and managed well, what is the primary benefit of a PROJECT retrospective?
Allows the team to get ahead on release planning.
When are acceptance tests typically written for a user story?
At the start of Product Backlog prioritization planning.
A business analyst has identified a new risk in an Agile project. What is the best first step the business analyst should take regarding this risk?
Add the risk in a clearly visible location and ensure it is discussed after the next daily stand up.
What are the primary outputs of a release planning session?
Risks, action items, dependencies, and Release Backlog
Which of the seven principles of software development is best intended to solve the problem of inventories causing hidden errors in the process?
Eliminate Waste
In a Lean project environment, visual controls:
Can be used by management for communicating specific corrective direction.
The team space is key in Agile projects. What is the one thing that is recommended above all others for Agile teams?
- Colocation
- Information radiators
- Caves and common rooms
- Scrum boards
Colocation
Agile Earned Value Management (EVM) would be a valuable technique for managing a project because …
cost performance must be reported.
A common reason that a story may not be estimable is that the:
- team has no experience in estimating.
- business needs are prioritized over the system design.
- team lacks domain knowledge.
- developers do not understand the tasks related to the story.
team lacks domain knowledge.
When using Agile Earned Value Management (EVM), progress should be measured at which level?
Release
What would be the reasoning behind having an Iteration Zero?
To determine a process that works
User stories are temporary artifacts. They are considered relevant until when?
Until the team completes them
What is Risk exposure?
Risk Exposure = Risk Impact * Risk Probability
Risk Exposure ~ Expected Monetary Value (EMV)
Risk exposure is the measure of potential future loss resulting from a specific activity or event. An analysis of the risk exposure for a business often ranks risks according to their probability of occurring multiplied by the potential loss if they do. By ranking the probability of potential losses, a business can determine which losses are minor and which are significant enough to warrant investment.
Continuous integration ensures that a product is…
Technologically ready to deploy at any time.
What is systems thinking?
TLDR: Consists in “zooming out” of a “part” to better understand the “whole”, that is, the boundary system within which the part functions.
Systems thinking/synthesis/holism is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements(reductionism). Systems thinking can be used to understand systems with high level of interconnectivity and interdependency through the synthesis approach, the process of reasoning that describes and entity through the context of its relations and functioning within the whole system that is a part of.
It can be used in any area of research and has been applied to the study of medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems, among many others.
According to systems thinking, system behavior results from the effects of reinforcing and balancing processes. A reinforcing process leads to the increase of some system component. If reinforcement is unchecked by a balancing process, it eventually leads to collapse. A balancing process is one that tends to maintain equilibrium in a particular system.
Attention to feedback is an essential component of system thinking. For example, in project management, prevailing wisdom may prescribe the addition of workers to a project that is lagging. However, in practice, that tactic might have actually slowed development in the past. Attention to that relevant feedback can allow management to look for other solutions rather than wasting resources on an approach that has been demonstrated to be counterproductive.
You have been tasked to evaluate the financial metrics of a potential project. You evaluated the percent of the benefit of the investment to the money invested. This is which of the financial assessment metrics?
ROI measure the amount of return on an investment relative to the investment’s cost. NPV is defined as the present value of cash flow over a series of time periods. The drawback to using the NPC approach is what the inflation rate and interest rate will be in the future is just a best guess, which may not always be correct. IRR is the discount rate at which project revenues and project costs equal zero. When a company is selecting which project to invest in, it will calculate the expected rate of return for each project and select the one that is project to yield the highest IRR.
What is the difference between validation and verification?
Validation: Are we building the right system?
Verification: Are we building the system right?
In other words, validation is concerned with checking that the system will meet the customer’s actual needs, while verification is concerned with whether the system is well-engineered, error-free, and so on. Verification will help to determine whether the software is of high quality, but it will not ensure that the system is useful.
A new stakeholder has joined your team. They are having a hard time focusing on really engaging with the team since their daily responsibilities are taking a lot of time. What could the team do to help alleviate the problem?
Very often, the people selected to be on an agile project team, are the busiest people in the organization because of their knowledge. But the team needs members who can most effectively help the team to understand the requirements and make the critical decisions. It might be beneficial for the project to pay to have someone take over the daily responsibilities to free up the stakeholder. The team cannot pitch in to help the stakeholder, which would compound the problem. Overloading the stakeholder would force him to decide where to place his time and of course, his boss is aware of the issues.
An essential discussion that should take place often is the definition of ‘done’. Why is this critical?
Defining ‘done’ is critical for satisfying all stakeholders’ expectations and to ensure everyone agrees as to what success is. The definitions of done is not meant to be used to negotiate new functionality or ideas, or to unveil new functionality at the last minute.
Among all these tools, which one is not used in knowledge sharing?
- Kanban board
- Bulletin boards
- White boards
- None of the above
None of the above
Your team has identified the highest value tasks of the project and want to deliver them as soon as possible. Why is this a good idea?
The longer high-value tasks take to deliver the longer the horizon becomes for risks that can reduce value. Maximize success by delivering as many high-value tasks before things change. Value-driven delivery means making decisions that prioritize the value-added activities and risk-reducing efforts of the project, then accomplishing the tasks based on the priorities.
As a member of the PMO, you are analyzing upcoming projects and feel that project teams will push back on one project. You understand this project is meant to implement safety standards for an off-shore manufacturing plant. Some project teams may not understand the value of this project, how do you avoid a long drawn out process of getting this project approved to move forward?
Assessing the value in financial terms is usually where a project begins. The organization would look at the financial ramifications on not undertaking a project, such as fines that might assessed, the business may be subjected to a lawsuit, the risk of the business shutting down. To avoid spending time trying to make teams understand its importance, spending money to outsource, or worse, defer the project to another time, the project should be marked as mandatory.
Your agile team leader recognizes that the team is disagreeing and seems to be overthinking a requirement. The team feels that a value stream mapping session would help identify the discrepancy. Once the scenario is defined, what is the next step?
Begin mapping the value stream by identifying the starting point and ending point. Next, identify the steps in the process, any supporting groups, and alternative flows. Once all time estimates are calculated, examine the value-added and non-value-added times to determine what can be eliminated.
As you look at your agile team’s high-level project plan, you notice there are three pre-mortems scheduled. You ask your leader to define a pre-mortem. Which of the following is the explanation given?
A pre-mortem is a session where all stakeholders will meet to generate a list of potential failure points and determine how to mitigate the possibility of the failure. The business owner’s participation is required since the team will offer resolutions to avoid a failure that the business owner will need to agree with. Business requirements are identified by the point of running a pre-mortem, since they are the source for the discussion. While conducting a pre-mortem, it would be improbable that the team envisions everything working as planned. All team members are identified by the time of a pre-mortem.
You are on a new agile team and the stakeholders are using the methodology without trying to tailor the processes at all. Why is this a good idea?
Making changes to the agile methodology prior to learning the benefits have been realized can be risky. Agile methods have been developed and refine based on many projects and experienced team leaders and members. Most agile tasks are related and dependent on other tasks, so dropping or adding tasks may throw the agile project out of balance. There is still a need for a project manager or team lead to keep the project headed in the right direction. There are predetermined processes, but it may be up to each team to document according to their needs.
Your agile team leader is discussing whether to tailor some agile’s methodologies because of what he refers to as systems thinking. Which of the following best describes systems thinking?
One part of systems thinking includes classifying projects in term of their complexity in two areas; project requirements and the technological approach. Complex projects have some uncertainty with requirements and technology, so are well suited for the out of the box agile methodology. Project that have a low or simple complexity can tailor some of the agile methods to suit the project.
Your agile team leader has been tracking the iteration velocity and compared that to the time left on the project and they determined that the least amount of iterations that can be done per month is seven and the most possible will be ten iterations. What is this measurement called?
This tool, or measurement, is called control limits. Setting a minimum and maximum of a certain entity, whether it be velocity, budget, time off, etc., lets the agile stakeholder know exactly what can be done, spent, or utilized in a given period of time. Trend analysis is a forward looking analysis estimating what might happen in the future. Variance analysis is the difference between estimates. Cycle time is the duration of time it will take to complete a task.
In an agile project, visibility is defined as what?
The concept that each team member’s work and progress should be transparent to all stakeholders.
Which guideline defines validation?
Making sure that the product manufactured is acceptable to the customers.
At which stage of adaptive leadership do you find the leader is asking many questions?
Early in a team’s formation, the leader directly helps with project activities and lays out a picture of what needs to be accomplished. The leader may also ask a lot of questions to ensure the team has an understanding of the team’s direction. While in the coaching phase, the leader mainly resolves conflicts so relationships are not damaged. During the supporting phase, the leader is still needed for conflict resolution in addition to challenging the team with high-level goals. The delegating stage is rarely achieved because teams are empowered.
You are an agile team leader and you’ve come to realize that there is very little interest coming from team members. What is a good method to motivate team members?
Offering a raise or bonus might engage team members for a short time, but probably not for the long-run. Aligning the project goal to the corporate goals still does not display ‘What’s in it for me?’ but aligning the project goals to the individual’s personal goals, for example, a promotion to a management position, will give them the motivation to be successful.
Your agile team is approaching their next iteration. There seems to be a disagreement of how the work items are prioritized since new functionality has been introduced. How can you assist the business team analyzing the priorities?
Agile planning is based on value-based analysis meaning the business value of deliverables are analyzed and delivered first. Agile teams can assist the business partners by factoring in likely development costs in order to make informed decisions. The time it takes to complete a task needs to have a cost associated with it before the priority is determined. The users typically don’t contribute to this process.
In conformity with agile terminologies, the personnel who measures the team’s progress (against the iteration plan, the release plan, test, etc.) and radiates the info to the team is the____________
Tracker
When your agile team is going through a pre-mortem, each member is asked to write down why they think some task or action might fail. The best method to reveal everyone’s list and consolidate it is to go around the room round-robin. Why do you think this might work well?
Presenting issues one at a time allows for discussion in the moment in addition to keeping the entire team engaged. When the list of failure points is complete and agreed upon, the team can prioritize the list and incorporate the fixes in the upcoming iterations.
What is the plus/delta review?
Plus= “What is working well”
Delta=”What needs change” -> Action items
When analyzing variances and it is determined that the difference is a common cause variance, what is the next step the agile leader should take?
When the agile team has determined the difference is a common cause variance, the team lead should accept that there will be small differences and move onto the next task. Trying to rectify a common cause variance is a form of micromanaging the project instead of focusing on true roadblocks.
What is the successful response option at Conflict Level 1 : Problem to Solve ?
Successful response options at Level 1 are, Collaboration- Seeking a win-win situation. Consensus- Learning where every team member’s head is with regard to the issue and, in time, arriving at a decision everyone can back.
What is Force field analysis?
Force field analysis is a technique for analyzing the forces that are encouraging and resisting potential or real change and the strength of these forces.
The Scrum framework is flexible enough to embrace many learning loops. Which of them is the shortest?
Scrum leverages several predefined learning loops. The Daily Scrum is a daily loop and the sprint review is an iteration-level loop. Pair programming is the shortest learning loop (feedback in seconds). Test-driven development has feedback in minutes.
Team 1 has been asked to complete work on Item 10 story and deliver it to Team 2 so that they can initiate work on Item 12 story, which is dependent on completion of Item 10 story. The leader of Team 1 decides to insert a buffer that protects the start date on Item 12 story against delays in the completion of Item 10 story. This buffer is known as,
The Feeding buffer protects the start date on Item 12 story against delays in the completion of Item 10 story.
When a team member approaches the Coach with a complaint about another team member, what conflict resolution technique should the Coach use?
Three-step intervention path:
- “Have you shared your concerns and feelings about this with _________?”
- “_________ should know of your concerns. Would it help if I go with you?”
- “May I tell _________ that you have these concerns?”
Can velocity be used as a performance metric?
Velocity is used as a planning tool and as a team diagnostic metric. It should not be used as a performance metric in an attempt to judge team productivity. When misused in this way, velocity can motivate wasteful and dangerous behavior.
In story splitting, what is vertical and horizontal slicing?
Horizontal slicing: breaking down the features into the work that has to be done at architectural layers, i.e., design, back, front …
Vertical slicing: stories are broken down in such a way that smaller items still result in working, demonstrable, software, or a specific working feature useful for the user
What is the least appropriate usage of the the documentation in Agile project?
When a customer and a developer interact to jointly develop specifications and produce some form of permanent record (documents, notes, sketches, story cards, drawings), the documentation is a by-product of the interaction. When the customer sits down with a business analyst and they write a requirements document that gets sent to a development group, then the document has become a substitute for interaction. In the first scenario, the documentation may be valuable to the development team. In the second, it has become a barricade to progress. Little knowledge is either gained or transferred. Furthermore, as interaction decreases, the volume of documentation increases in a fruitless attempt to compensate.
