ASM - Agile Scrum Master (EXIN)
The team suggested to the product owner that they should be improving the audit trial and error logging, as it will make it easier to maintain the product. The value proposition of the story is to enable:
Ease of maintenance is most likely to lead to improvement in operational efficiency.
A project involves a lot of uncertainty. How should this be handled in timeboxed projects where there is a firm commitment on deadlines?
Features buffer means that low-priority features can be removed from scope if the team runs out of time.
A team was working on a huge project with a busy schedule and a lot of work to be done. During one of the demos, the customer suggested changes to the project which marks a significant deviation from the roadmap that was agreed upon. How should the team respond to this?
Feedback is valuable, and the team should try to accommodate the changes which help the customer. The Product Owner should take note of the feedback and prioritize it against the existing work.
Project A had an NPV of $10,000 and IRR of 12%. Project B had an NPV of -$5000 and IRR of 3%. Project C had an NPV of $15,000 and IRR of 8%. Project D has an NPV of $12,000 and IRR of 14%. Which project should be selected if the organization wants to think long-term?
IRR represents the value added over a period of time, so if the organization has a long-term perspective, they should choose a project that has the highest IRR.
A team wants to decide the sprint duration. The scrum master should tell them that although shorter sprints are better, longer sprints may be used if:
If the overheads of iteration are high, the team may consider slightly longer sprints.
During an Agile transition, a customer complains that Agile methods require spending too much time with the teams explaining requirements and providing feedback. How will you address this concern?
In Agile methods, the customer needs should be reflected in the product. Therefore it is imperative that the customers are intimately involved in the development process.
Why is awareness needed as a first step to start an Agile transition?
In the ADAPT model, Awareness represents the fact that we have come to the conclusion that the existing system is not serving us well.
An Agile team decided to use the MoSCoW prioritization method. In MoSCoW, what is the correct interpretation of C (Could)?
In the MoSCoW prioritization method, the C's or Coulds are the nice-to-have items.
The scrum master of an Agile team that completed a successful pilot implementation did a brown bag session with a group of people to explain to them how they achieved phenomenal results with scrum. What is the purpose of this session in the context of the overall Agile transition?
In the Promote stage of the ADAPT framework, the successful teams need to promote their early successes to make sure that they can get momentum behind the transition.
Use of information radiators is important for Agile projects. Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a good information radiator?
Information radiators should not be fixed. They should focus on a specific problem and be refreshed with new set of targets.
A team wants to use scrum, but the organization does not have any scrum expertise. What is the best option to select the scrum master?
It is OK to hire an external person as the scrum master, until the organization can coach and groom somebody to play the role.
An organization was using scrum for about a year. A new CEO joined the organization and asked them what advantages were derived from using scrum, as she was not fond of following the scrum method. The team felt that scrum was better but could not provide any supporting data for it. What should have been done to prevent this?
It is a good practice to measure the outcomes expected from scrum.
A team feels that speed of working and flow of work are the fundamental goals rather than regular feedback. The best method for the team would be to use:
Kanban focuses on speed of delivery by creating a proper workflow.
A team practicing Kanban approaches finds that there is a lot of work to be handled and the lead-time for the customer is increasing. Which of the following is the best way to reduce the time to deliver work to the customer?
Reducing the work-in-progress might create more focus on the work and reduce the lead-time for the customer.
A scrum team regularly finds that it has to rush toward the end of a three-week sprint and work overtime in the last week. How can the scrum master coach the team to avoid this?
Regular tracking of progress might help the team prevent last-minute panic and rush in the sprints.
An organization decided to conduct scrum training for their HR team and invited a senior Agile coach to facilitate it. Some of the HR team members wonder why they need this training. What should the coach tell them?
Scrum changes a number of things, such as titles, ways of working, and need to collaborate. Many of these changes need active involvement from the HR team.
The scrum master needs to be a facilitator of various scrum events. It involves all of the following but does NOT include:
Scrum masters are not supposed to be making decisions; they should facilitate the process of decision-making.
What is the fundamental reason behind a scrum master not being the product owner as well for a team?
Scrum masters often need to push back against the PO if they become too demanding and tend to burn the team out.
A scrum master is new to the role. Which of the following is aligned with this role?
Scrum masters should help teams when product owners act too pushy and demanding.
Which if the following is the primary purpose of a scrum-of-scrum meeting?
Scrum-of-scrum is a forum to encourage cross-team collaboration.
Which is the most appropriate forum to solve integration problems within a group of scrum teams that are coordinating to build a large product?
Scrum-of-scrums is a mechanism to coordinate the work of multiple scrum teams and solve integration challenges.
A project is being performed in two locations. There are two modules in the product and both are quite self-contained. What is a good way to manage the distribution of the teams?
Since the two modules are relatively self-contained, it is better to use the collaborating colocated model.
An organization has decided to use scrum, but there are a number of skeptics. What is the best way to convince the skeptics?
Skeptics are against scrum but are not that vocal. It is possible to win them over by giving them data and training on scrum.
There are many skeptics in an organization that is transitioning to Agile. How should the organization deal with them?
Skeptics are those who doubt the effectiveness of scrum. The best way to engage them is to give them more information and training about scrum.
Members of a successful Agile pilot team were split and added to different teams so that they could trigger an Agile transition in those teams. What is this strategy called?
Split and seed strategy is exemplified in this scenario.
A team regularly finds that it has to move work to the next sprint, as most of the user stories are partly done. Which of the following is the best way to address this?
Splitting stories to smaller units may help the team complete them within the sprint rather than having to extend them to multiple sprints.
A team was doing a three-week sprint. In the first week, there was a big organizational restructuring which completely changed the product priorities. The product owner felt that the current sprint is completely futile and asked the scrum master for advice on how to proceed. What advice should the scrum master give?
Sprint cancelation is an option that can be used in extreme circumstances where the current sprint's backlog becomes completely useless for some reason.
An Agile team received a number of suggestions on how to increase the value proposition of a product at a trade conference. How should these suggestions be reflected in the product backlog?
Sprint retrospective is an opportunity to discuss process improvement opportunities within the team.
Jeff wanted the team to start using a new tool to improve the quality of their deliverables by automating some key processes. Where should Jeff bring this up for discussion?
Sprint retrospective is an opportunity to discuss process improvement opportunities within the team.
What is the advantage of a start-small transition over the all-in model?
Start-small or pilot approach will help limit the risk, as the experiment will be confined to a few projects at a time.
A team was using the planning poker technique to estimate story points. Each team member was estimating the stories from their perspective (Development, testing, infrastructure, or documentation). It was hard to get a estimate. What should the scrum master do?
Story points are meant to be for the entire team. Therefore, the team has to arrive at a consensus collectively, considering the entire work involved.
An important difference between ideal time estimates and story points is that the latter are:
Story points are unitless, therefore it is difficult for external stakeholders to understand.
A team felt during the retrospectives that they are not creating enough technical documentation which is hurting them. What should the scrum master do?
Technical documentation is important. If the team feels the need for it, they should figure out a way to make it a part of the definition of done.
An organization wanted to bring in a number of improvements in the technical processes such as DevOps and configuration management early in the Agile transformation. You would say it would be better to bring the changes in stages rather than all in one go if:
Technical practices like DevOps and configuration management have a high ROI potential, but you may want to bring them in stages if you anticipate significant resistance from the team.
A large project has about 10 scrum teams working together. What is a good way to share knowledge about the technical practices that are being employed in the project?
A community of practice helps the team members share knowledge with others in the organization.
Mary is a follower in the Agile transition movement going on in her organization. She typically does not resist any change actively, but she is a little disappointed that the existing system is being shelved in which she was very comfortable. What is the best way to deal with Mary?
A good way to bring followers around in an Agile transition is to involve them in the transition process.
A product owner wanted to know not just the overall project status but also epic- and story-level status. Which information radiator will help the product owner get this information?
A parking lot chart reflects the status per epic and user story.
An organization wants to conduct a pilot project to try Agile methods. A team volunteers for the pilot, but the Agile coach says the size of the project is too short. Why is it not recommended to have a short project as a pilot?
A pilot project should ideally be of a medium duration, as success in a small project will not convince the skeptics.
Becoming a scrum master requires a lot of qualities and skills. Which of the following is the least important quality required for a scrum master?
A scrum master helps and supports the team. The team should feel that they are all collectively accountable for the delivery. Scrum master does not need to impose this on them.
Five teams are part of a Nexus. They regularly realign their priorities. However, they often discover that they make wrong assumptions about what work and when the other teams will deliver. This issue causes the sprints to fail. Which of the following is the best way to address this?
Dependencies among the teams participating in a Nexus must be identified early so that they can be planned ahead.
A huge product has 10 teams in 3 locations. How many product backlogs should be created?
Each product should have only one product backlog. It causes confusion about the product direction if information is fragmented.
A team could not agree whether the stories in a sprint were complete or not. When can the team decide that the stories are completed successfully?
Each scrum team should have a documented and agreed-upon definition of done. Basis this, the team should determine completeness of the stories and sprints.
A scrum team just completed a release plan. The business wanted multiple smaller deliverables during the release. What should the team do?
Each sprint in a scrum project is supposed to be near releasable. Creating intermediate deliverables should not be a problem for the team.
What is the difference between a conventional release plan and a Nexus approach to planning?
The Nexus approach to planning focuses on one sprint to avoid rigid plans.
In addition to the progress information, the leadership wants to know about the state of mind of the teams as they are work through sprints. Which indicator will help them get this information?
The Niko calendar indicates the state of mind of the team by asking each team member to vote on an emoji that reflects what they feel.
A team got stuck due to a blocking issue which impacted several user stories they were planning to complete in a sprint. In spite of the best efforts of the scrum master to resolve the issue, the team will now be able to deliver only a few stories. What can be done about this situation?
The PO should be informed about the situation; based on the PO's inputs, the work for the current sprint should be reprioritized to make more realistic projections of what can be done.
A Product Owner is planning to be away for a few weeks, visiting some customers. Their availability to the team may be a little low. How should the team handle this situation?
The Product Owner being absent can cause problems to the team. Temporary absence can be handled by the Product Owner by bringing the scrum master or another team member to temporarily field the queries and maintain product direction.
The product owner for a team is never available for the team. She says she is too busy with customer meetings and does not have the time. How should the scrum master address this?
The Product Owner needs to be available to the team for planning, clarifications, and demos. The team will be directionless otherwise.
During the retrospective, quite a few team members said that too much work was being pushed by the product owner and they felt under pressure. What should the scrum master do?
The scrum master needs to help the team push back sometimes against the product owner who might be too pushy about the work.
The scrum master of a team is a technology expert and feels that the team is going down the wrong path. What is the best option for the scrum master?
The scrum master should not become the technical decision-maker of the team. But they are allowed to give pointers and encourage the team to think about their approach.
The technical leader of a team volunteered to be the scrum master. Which of the following is one of the risks of this arrangement?
The scrum master should not provide direction to team members but a tech lead is expected to provide directions.
A scrum master is new to an organization. She is unable to help the teams with a lot of the blocking issues. This means team members don't always get the help that they need. What should be done about this?
The scrum master's primary responsibility is to help the team overcome obstacles. Scrum masters can be coached about how to grow into the role, but if they are unable to do so, they need to be replaced.
A team was unable to decide how long their sprints should be. They sought advice from the scrum master. What is the best advice that the scrum master can give?
The scrum master, as a process coach, can provide advice about process decisions. Stability of the backlog is an important factor in deciding the sprint length. More unstable the backlog, shorter the sprints should be.
A large project has multiple teams working together. They have a scrum-of-scrum meeting regularly. What is the basic purpose of scrum-of-scrum?
The scrum-of-scrum is meant to help the teams integrate their work and solve common problems.
A team usually sends the scrum master to the scrum-of-scrum meetings. For one particular meeting, the scrum master was not well and could not attend. Who should represent the team in his absence?
The scrum-of-scrums is an important forum which helps to coordinate the work of multiple scrum teams. A team can chose a representative who will represent them in the meeting.
A product manager wants to start a new product-related project. She wonders whether Agile methods would add value to this. You can say that the project would be suitable for Agile methods if
Agile methods are most suitable when the requirements are likely to change frequently during the project duration.
A company is losing market share, because the product releases are invariably delayed. The management decided to try Agile methods. How would Agile help reduce the time it takes to get the products to market faster?
Agile methods will help deliver the minimally viable products faster by approaching the projects in an incremental and iterative way.
Jim is a specialist in a technology related to data management. The scrum coach is trying to persuade Jim to learn a technology related to his specialization and become more cross-functional. Jim doesn't understand why he needs to do this. What is the best explanation if Jim works on an Agile team?
Agile teams, being small, need to embrace a bit more cross-functionality so that they can be capable of delivering complex product increments with minimal dependencies.
How can the administration and facilities team support an organization which is embarking on an Agile transition?
An Agile workspace helps the team achieve real-time and effective communication. This can be an enabler to an Agile transition.
If the team could not agree on the estimate for a story in the planning poker session, the scrum master should advice them to:
An estimate is the best guess. Teams often stress themselves unnecessarily about the estimation process.
There was a project which had team members distributed across multiple locations. The team wanted to travel to one location for an in-person release planning meeting, for which a budget request was raised. Finance department was very hesitant to approve it. How can you convince the Finance department about the value of this proposal?
An in-person meeting is likely to lead to better understanding and reduce the hidden costs of development.
Why does the ADAPT framework has awareness as the first step?
Awareness is needed so that we know why the existing system is broken and why a new system is needed.
A team was working on a sprint. During the sprint, the team encountered a number of unexpected technical difficulties because of which the time estimate for a number of tasks increased. What will the burndown chart show?
Burndown charts track the remaining work; if the estimates are revised upwards, it will result in the graph looking up, in other words, a burnup.
A few members of a team are practical and usually open to ideas. They are called pragmatists. What should be done to engage the pragmatists?
Pragmatists prefer to hear reasoning, get data, and get involved. They are not against change; they just prefer reasoned approach to change.
A team finds that in the race to complete a feature, it was leaving a lot of technical debt like open defects, pending verification, and poorly structured product. Which practice can help the team get back on track?
Continuous refactoring is a practice that helps a team refactor the product to improve the design and achieve higher level of quality.
A team follows a method which uses timeboxed iterations and projects and MoSCoW prioritization. Which method maps closest to this description?
DSDM uses timeboxed projects and MoSCoW prioritization.
A team uses an Agile method which involves timeboxed projects and a prioritization system which categorizes work as Must, Should, Could, and Won't. Which system is being used here?
DSDM uses timeboxed projects with MoSCoW prioritization.
There are 10 teams working on a complex project and only three product owners. The product owners are under a lot of stress. How can we address this situation?
One Product Owner cannot support more than one or two teams. There is no substitute to scaling up the number of Product Owners according to the number of Scrum teams working together.
An organization thinks they need to change and try Agile approaches but there is no real interest in proceeding. What is a good way to create desire to use scrum?
One way to increase desire is to drive home the sense of urgency behind the need for change.
A team completed stories in a sprint which were worth 40 story points. In addition, they completed 50% of a story whose estimate was 8 points. They spent about 10% of the sprint duration on unexpected maintenance work related to the product. What is the velocity of the team?
Only the completed work should be taken into consideration for calculating the velocity of the team.
Osmotic communication is enhancing the communication and collaboration practices in the team. Which of the following supports osmotic communication the most in an Agile team?
Osmotic communication is communication that spreads across barriers through flows and currents. A well-designed workspace for an Agile team definitely enhances osmotic communication.
A product owner is appointed to a new product. She can expect that over time:
Over time, the demands on the product owner's time will increase.
Which of the following extreme programming techniques helps the most in knowledge sharing across the team?
Pair programming involves two people working on the same task. This helps knowledge sharing across the team.
A team likes all the team members to work in pairs on critical deliverables. What is the biggest advantage of this practice?
Pair programming leads to knowledge sharing across the team.
A team decided to try pair programming as a practice. One of the advantages of pair programming is that:
Pair programming should lead to better quality due to online review. It may or may not lead to other benefits.
An organization decided to use scrum. They knew that their existing system was broken, and they had heard good things about scrum from other organizations. Few months later, they got disillusioned with scrum and decided to abandon the experiment. Each team came up with a different way of defining scrum roles and duties. None of the teams had a full time scrum master or product owner. There was confusion and chaos. What could have been done to make the transition successful?
Per the ADAPT framework, the organization does not seem to have spent time and energy in coaching the teams on scrum due to which they struggled.
A product owner did not accept a user story during the review claiming that the team did not perform enough acceptance tests. What should have been done to prevent this?
The acceptance criteria for a user story should be clarified ideally in advance so that the team knows what they need to validate.
A burndown bar chart for a team shows that the bar has gone below the X-axis. What could this mean?
The bar extends down in the burndown bar chart when the project scope is extended.
In a burndown bar chart, the bottom of the bar in a particular sprint move downwards by 50 points. What does this indicate?
The bottom of the bar moving downwards indicates that scope of the project was increased.
A product owner wanted to track the progress of the team and scope changes on a project. Which of the following should the PO choose to use?
The burndown bar chart tells you about the scope changes as well as the work completed by the team.
Tom, the scrum master of his team attends the stand-up meeting, quickly asks the team members to report their status to him, and wraps up the meeting in five minutes. Nobody is allowed to speak out of turn. Is this a good way to conduct a stand-up meeting?
The daily stand-up meeting is an important forum for the team to sync up. But it should not feel as if the scrum master is micromanaging the team.
If a team does not deliver the committed stories in a sprint, who is accountable for the outcome?
The entire team should feel accountable for the outcome. This is the basis of self-organization.
At the end of the first sprint in a product release having several sprints, the team got some feedback and insights about its velocity. Based on this feedback and insight, what might change for the team?
The feedback and insights from each sprint are extremely valuable and should be used to revisit and if necessary change the product, release, and sprint backlogs.
An organization wonders if Agile would be a good fit for the work it does. Which of the following characteristics of the work will make it most suitable for use of Agile methods?
The important advantage of Agile methods is that it helps you adapt to changes quickly, therefore the most suitable conditions for Agile is if the work is dynamic and changeable.
Who should take action if a team member is not able to perform as expected within a scrum team?
The manager of the team member should be managing the performance of the team members. Inputs can come from the PO, scrum master, or team, but performance management still remains with the reporting manager.
An organization abandoned its scrum experiment in about six months. They had launched an organization-wide change initiative. There were too many people having different opinions and objections to the initiative, and there was no strong leadership backing it. Most people did not even understand why they were making the change. What can be done to revive the initiative?
The organization did not create awareness among the teams about why the change was needed. Awareness is the first step in the ADAPT framework for managing change.
Which of the following is a project-related factor that might prove detrimental to the adoption of Agile methods?
The primary purpose of the Agile way of working is the ability to get early feedback by showcasing the product. If this is not possible to do, it may not be a suitable project for Agile methods.
The team struggles to prioritize the requirements, because every stakeholder tries to push their favorite stories. Which of the following is the best way to resolve this?
The product owner and team should find a system for prioritization that considers all the relevant factors.
The product backlog for a particular product contains too many stories. A product owner came across a product idea that is valuable but may not be worked on immediately. What should be done about this?
The product owner may often add stories at the epic level for requirements that will be worked on in the future.
After a sprint was completed, the team felt they should not conduct the retrospective, because they had no time to work on any improvement actions in the current project. What should the scrum master do?
The retrospective is a mandatory event, and it can potentially add a lot of value to the team. Every team is busy, but neglecting continuous improvement can cost the team in the long run.
An Agile team is working on the development of a product. A team will be created to support and maintain the product when it is launched. What is the best time and opportunity for the development team to engage the support team?
The support teams can provide valuable feedback and insights about the product that the team is building. The iteration demo is a good forum to get them up to speed about what is being done and get their feedback about it.
An Agile coach wants the organization transitioning to scrum to invest heavily in technical practices. Which of the following is a potential challenge in introducing technical practices early in an Agile transition?
The team which already has a lot on its plate may push back or resist the adoption of these practices. But this challenge needs to be overcome, as technical practices give a very high RoI.
The manager of a team felt that the team's velocity is not acceptable, as other teams seem to be having a higher number. What should the scrum master say to that?
The velocity of a team should not be compared against others. Each team is unique, and it is misleading to form conclusions from the numbers without the context.
A senior team member felt that story points are less useful than ideal time estimates because they are specific to a team. As a scrum master, you should:
Whether it is story points or ideal time, estimates are meant to be used by the team for planning. Even if the statement is taken at face value, it is not really a drawback of story points.
A team's workload expanded, so they moved from one scrum team to over three scrum teams. The product owner is stressed because of the workload from all three teams. What is the best way forward?
Typically one PO should support one team. More than that is likely to lead to more stress for the PO.
A team which has a complex set of subsystems that needs to integrate for the product to work should focus majority of the energy into:
Unit testing lies at the base of the test pyramid. If the units are not well tested, it is impossible to integrate them properly.
A team's average velocity over the past few sprints was 45 with a maximum of 60 and minimum of 20. Which of these values should be used to predict the number of sprints needed for a project with a release backlog of close to 300 points?
Unless circumstances dictate otherwise, it is a reasonable approach to use an average velocity over longer time periods.
The team completed 5 stories in a sprint of sizes 5, 2, 13, 8, and 1. Simultaneously they worked on stories worth 30 points which they partly completed but could not complete per the definition of done. What is the velocity of the team?
Velocity considers the stories that are completed per the definition of done. Therefore, the velocity is the sum of the completed stories, which is 29 points.
Which of the following is the one aspect that should NOT be taken into consideration while calculating the velocity of a team?
Whatever work is not complete per the definition of done, should not be considered in the velocity calculation.
