Agile Foundations

FINAL EXAM

1. In the penny game exercise, why do you think it takes longer for one person to flip five batches of two pennies then one batch of ten pennies?

• Five batches of two pennies requires much more flipping
• A batch of ten pennies requires much more multitasking
• You have less collaboration on one large batch of work
• The more handoffs you have, the more quickly you can deliver the work

2. How does the Pareto principle apply to product development?

• If you work less than 80% of the time then you will have 20% less value
• 20% of the time you’re working on 80% of the product
• Often 80% of your product’s value comes from 20% of your efforts
• You have to always focus on the 80% of the product

3. Your team has been working on a software project for over a year. The software is behind schedule, so the executives have pressured the managers to try an agile approach. The manager for your team says that there are three project milestones coming up in the next six months. So the manager suggests that they simply rename the three milestones Sprint 1, Sprint 2 and Sprint 3. What’s the biggest challenge with this approach?

• It’s unlikely that your team will get any benefit from an agile mindset by following existing practices
• Sprints are just agile milestones, so there’s no reason to rename them
• In Scrum, sprints are usually just two weeks long and these would take several months
• The most important thing is to follow agile practices, So the team needs to be trained on these practices before making the change

4. What does it mean when you say that Scrum separates the “what” from the “how?”

• The development team decides both what will get delivered and how it will be delivered
• Agile teams always know what to deliver and how
• The product owner decides what the team will deliver, and the team decides how they’ll deliver it
• The team decides what will go into this story, and the product owner decides how it will get done

5. You work as a software developer on an agile team. Your manager has decided that the team must work off the existing requirements documents. What’s one of the main challenges with this approach?

• Agile teams always write their own requirements documentation
• Agile teams only work off user story cards, so the team should copy the requirements onto cards
• If the project requirements are already created, then the product owner would have to leave the team
• Agile teams embrace change, requirement documents are designed to limit conversation and flexibility

6. Your agile team only has one database developer. So the other developers finish their tasks and then wait for their work to be Integrated into the database. This creates a backup for the database developer. But it also means that the other developers must either wait or add to a growing pile of database work. What’s one possible solution to this challenge?

• Encourage the database developer to work overtime to catch up with the work
• Create a large batch of work so the database developer can focus on finishing
• Have the software developers split their time between other teams
• Have the database developer train the rest of the team so there are fewer handoffs

7. What does it mean that Scrum defines itself as a “framework for empirical process control?”

• Scrum teams encourage process control through well-defined agile practices
• It means that Scrum tries to keep the team from running experiments that might impact the process
• It means that Scrum teams are encouraged to run experiments to improve the product
• Scrum teams try to control every bit of the process through a defined empirical plan

8. What is typically not part of the product owner’s role?

• They create a ranked list of items in the product backlog
• They create the project requirements documentation
• They work with the customer to help set the direction for the product
• They help the customer decide what’s the most valuable functions and features

9. What’s the best definition of a product iteration?

• It is an agile project phase
• It’s a project development phase which is designed to encourage teams to multitask
• It is an incremental step towards delivering your product
• It’s a way for an agile team to plan everything that’s going to happen in the project

10. The business analysts at your organization often take weeks to come up with an updated set of requirements. So the senior developer for your team encourages everyone to catch up on their training while they wait for the update. If you were an agile coach for the organization, what might you do to improve the situation?

• You would ask this software development team to only do peer-to-peer training
• You would make sure that the business analyst and the senior developers are in the same organizational silo
• You would ask the business analyst to write all the requirements on user story cards
• You would encourage someone from the business to sit with the team to eliminate the handoff

11. In the Agile Manifesto Principles 3 and 7 recommend continuous software delivery in “weeks” as a measure of progress. What’s one of the ways an agile team can follow this principle?

• Have weekly progress reports
• Be sure to wait a few weeks before delivering software
• Every week you’ll continuously deliver software
• Deliver software in two-weeks iterations or “Sprints”

12. Your agile team has a senior developer that’s been with the organization for over a decade. Whenever something goes wrong with the product, the director pulls this person out of the team to fix the trouble. What’s likely to happen on your agile team when this person is pulled from their tasks?

• Agile teams work in close collaboration, so this will likely create a backup
• It’s easily fixed, because this developer will just handoff their work to the next person
• Agile teams are designed to deal with these types of changes
• Agile teams are more flexible, so this type of personnel change has little effect

13. The director of your software product development team has started a new initiative that emphasizes organizational knowledge sharing. So they purchased licenses for a social group chat platform. They asked you to keep the platform open to answer questions that are relevant to the product. Why might this be difficult for your agile team?

• The platform will encourage your team to multitask
• Agile teams try to eliminate as much direct feedback as possible
• This will lead to too many interactions with the customer
• The customer might be tempted to ask for functions and features through the platform

14. How are organizational silos related to the penny game?

• Organizational silos encouraged individuals to create large batches of work
• Organizational silos limit the number of handoffs
• The penny game showed that organizational silos encourage better collaboration
• The penny game shows that organizational silos are the most efficient way to work

15. When working with an agile team, managers will often give up long term plans for predictability. So why are agile teams more predictable?

• Agile teams create two-week milestones that delivers predefined functionality
• Agile teams commit to delivering product increments every two weeks
• Agile teams work off long-term plans
• Because agile teams don’t plan, they deliver

16. Your agile team has set up a task board with a list of user stories under the “To Do” column. the Scrum Master says that the team can pull out the cards in any order that they like. So the developers start working on user stories that they think will be completed quickly. Is the Scrum Master right?

• No, the agile team should always work on the highest priority user stories first
• Yes, the team members should start the largest batches of work
• Yes, if the developers work on the easiest stories then they’re more likely to finish them in the Sprint
• No, the Scrum Master should be the one who assigns the developers their story

17. What is not a characteristic of a self-organized team?

• These teams have a director who assigns everyone their tasks
• These teams have generalists that understand many different technologies
• These teams rely on collective decision making
• These teams come up with their own plan on how to deliver the product

18. What’s one of the best ways to avoid the challenges with the cone of uncertainty?

• Don’t make all your decisions at the beginning when you know the least about the final product
• Accurately predict how everything will turn out so that you don’t need to worry about the uncertainty
• Plan everything at the beginning so that you don’t have to make changes later on
• Focus on making a detailed plan that we’ll guide teams through the uncertainty