Week 4 - Sheets & Articles

Question 1

Name some benefits of agile.

Answer 1

• Increases team productivity, employee satisfaction
• Minimizing waste in redundant meetings, repetitive planning etc. etc.
• Improving customer engagement and satisfaction
• Builds mutual trust & respect, org. experience
• Senior managers can devote themselves more to higher-value work

Question 2

Where wouldn’t agile work?

Answer 2

In the military (you can’t have errors), or within a hospital

Question 3

What are the 3 principles of XP?

Answer 3

• Feedback: from system, customer and team
• Simplicity: build the simple solution first
• Embrace Change: user stories & priorities (MoSCoW)

Question 4

What are the 4 basic activities of XP?

Answer 4

Listening (to business needs), designing, coding, and testing.

Question 5

What does pair programming mean?

Answer 5

Code has no owner: forced to improve quality.

Learning from experiences colleagues, on the job.

Question 6

What are the 3 roles of SCRUM?

Answer 6

• Scrum master
• Product owner (prioritizing)
• Development team (autonomous, 3-9 people, both specialists & generalists)

Question 7

What does Scrum of Scrums mean?

Answer 7

Coordinate multiple teams on the same product

Question 8

What does a burn-down chart show?

Answer 8

Remaining work in the sprint backlog, updated in daily scrum.

Question 9

What does a burn-up chart show?

Answer 9

Progress towards scheduled release, with lines representing average, best and worst-case scenarios.

Question 10

Name some KPIs for a SCRUM team.

Answer 10

• Sprint goal success
• Team velocity (avg story points per sprint)
• Scope change
• Customer satisfaction
• Team satisfaction
• Team member turnover
• Missing: software quality!

Question 11

Name some characteristics of SAFE.

Answer 11

• Formal responsibilities & roles
• Epics & budgeting
• Agile release train (pipeline)

Question 12

Name 2 characteristics of LeSS.

Answer 12

Large Scale Scrum:

• Lightweight framework
• Experimentation so teams and organizations can adapt

Question 13

What is the Spotify model?

Answer 13

A scaled agile model by Henrik Kniberg, hybrid based on LeSS and corporate culture.

Question 14

How are agile and lean similar to eachother?

Answer 14

They share the following principles:

• Value: better alignment with customer (no wastage)
• Flow: fast sprints, continuous delivery, immediate feedback

Question 15

What is wastage in Lean?

Answer 15

Anything that doesn’t add value to the customer.

Question 16

Is quality control wastage? And compliance?

Answer 16

It depends. Try to build quality control or compliance into the process and social interaction (compliance by design), instead of on top of it (then it is wastage).

Question 17

What are the 5 steps in Lean?

Answer 17

1. Identify which features create value; rest is considered wastage
2. Identify the sequence of activities called the value stream
3. Make the activities flow
4. Let the customer pull product/service through the process -> work only when there is demand; produce to order
5. Perfect the process

Question 18

Where lies the focus in the Theory of constraints?

Answer 18

Bottlenecks / system constraints

Question 19

What are some of BPR’s key principles / process improvements?

Answer 19

• Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
• Have those who use the output of the process perform the process.
• Subsume information-processing into the real work that produces the information.
• Treat geographically dispersed resources as though centralized.
• Link parallel activities instead of later integrating their results.
• Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.
• Capture information once and at the source.

Question 20

What is DevOps?

Answer 20

A set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production (ops), while ensuring high quality (Bass et al., 2015)
Basically, release management.

Question 21

IT auditors (compliance) traditionally demand DTAP practices. Explain DTAP and what is required for this to work.

Answer 21

Develop Test Acceptance Production.
It requires:
- Formal roles in deployment process (segregation of duties)
- Environment to support these stages (DTAP-street, SAP servers)

Question 22

Do you need both DevOps and Agile?

Answer 22

Yes, you have to use both:

• If you have Agile but not DevOps, then you would end up with innovation that gets stuck
• If you have DevOps but not Agile, you have a very fast way to take into production, but nothing (little) to feed.

Question 23

There is a tradeoff in continuous change; agile may lead to a lack of direction & waste of resources. Explain the tradeoff.

Answer 23

• Stability: hard to change objectives and commitment of resources
• Flexibility: easy to change commitments

The ideal is to be stable on infrastructure, but flexible on outcomes (Lego-block vision)

Question 24

What is the socio-technical theory?

Answer 24

Organizations are both social and technical systems, and the core of the software organization is represented through the interface between the technical and human (social) system.

Question 25

What are the conditions to succeed in self-managing agile teams, according to Dyba et al. (2014)?

Answer 25

• Clear, engaging direction
• An enabling performing unit structure
• A supportive organizational context
• Available expert coaching
• Adequate resources

Question 26

Why is it challenging to establish well-functioning agile teams, according to Dyba et al. (2014)?

Answer 26

There is conflict between individual and team autonomy.

Question 27

How can a project manager ensure autonomy on both the team and individual levels? (Dyba et al., 2014)

Answer 27

• The team has authority to define work strategies and processes, project goals and resources allocation
• All team members jointly share decision authority
• A team member must have some freedom in carrying out the assigned task

Question 28

How is shared decision-making different in traditional development vs. agile development?

Answer 28

In agile, the team has decision authority on all levels (operational, tactical, strategic).
Traditionally, they only have authority on the operational level.

Question 29

What is escalation of commitment? How to prevent this?

Answer 29

Escalating situations where decision-makers allocate resources to a failing course of action.
To prevent this: make sure that team meetings do not become a place for defending decisions.

Question 30

What are the 4 principles of agile project management, according to Dyba et al. (2014)?

Answer 30

• Minimum critical specification (don’t specify more than essential for overall success)
• Autonomous teams (are responsible for managing & monitoring their own processes and executing tasks)
• Redundancy (team members should be skilled in more than one function)
• Feedback and learning (integral to project execution & its interaction with the environment

Question 31

What is a ‘wicked problem’?

Answer 31

A problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.
No single solution to the problem, improvements can always be made.