IST 442 Sprint 3 Exam

A product is required to be shipped in six months. If the release plan contains thirteen two-week iterations with on average twenty story points per iteration, what is the project size?

260 story points

Which of the following planning activities is NOT part of release planning?

Assigning resources to tasks.

Which of the following is the ordered list of all the work, presented in story form, for a team?

Backlog

High-performing agile teams feature which of the following sets of characteristics?

Constructive disagreement, empowered, self-organizing

You and your Agile team are currently making team commitments regarding what features will be progressed or completed prior to the next planning meeting. Which meeting is this?

Daily meeting

Which of the following is the Agile view on derailed cost estimates for projects with high degrees of uncertainty or those where the scope is not yet fully defined?

Detailed cost estimates are reserved for short-term planning horizons

Which of the following IS a root cause analysis technique?

Five Whys

The primary reason constructive disagreement is valued on high-performing agile teams is to:

Generate buy-in for decisions.

Which of the following needs isn't relevant to designing agile team spaces?

Help everyone understand how to operate and reset the printer.

Which of the following benefits would your agile team most likely gain from performing a self-assessment?

Improve the team's practices.

Agile teams incorporate rolling wave planning to do which one of the following?

Incorporate high-level plans with the knowledge that they will be updated.

Engaging with stakeholders involves having the emotional intelligence to understand their concerns and to work to determine what they value. In order to be effective in this role, which of the following skills are necessary?

Interpersonal skills

Pete and Kim paired on designing a new sorting algorithm that, while late, did improve reporting performance.

Inventing rather than researching

Your team members are estimating their tasks. What process are they engaged in?

Iteration planning

On a colocated team, what is one of the major benefits of everyone sitting together in the same workspace?

Osmotic communication is enhanced.

Continuous improvement is a core benefit of which agile practices?

Pair programming, daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives

If your total cycle time has remained the same but your value-added time has gone up, what does this mean?

The efficiency of your process has improved.

Your team disagrees on the direction a requirement should take, and it is convinced that the customer hasn't explained it correctly. As a servant leader, what can you identify as the reason for the misunderstanding?

The gulf of misunderstanding [evaluation] has occurred, and more information is needed to determine the correct direction.

The product owner has told the team how much work will need to be completed in the next iteration. In this scenario:

The product owner is overstepping their role.

Ideally, who will catch and fix a coding error?

The reviewer will catch it during pair programming.

You hear that another team is using an agile-traditional hybrid approach. What is this most likely to involve?

They are using agile methods to build the product and traditional methods for the procurement workflow.

You have asked your team to conduct a brainstorming session to generate ideas for effective behaviors at work and then choose five to seven principles to guide team interactions or processes. What are you developing?

Working agreements

Process tailoring would be a good option for:

A team that is using agile successfully but would like to improve their methods

As an Agile project manager, you explain to your team that, as their coach, you are there to provide for the team's needs and remove any roadblocks to their progress. This is also described as which one of the following?

Adaptive leadership

Which of the following represents a user story?

As an end user, I want to be able to review status reports daily so that I can track project performance.

Bill and Ally are having a disagreement in the break room about something they saw on the news the night before. You are walking by, and you overhear the disagreement. As a servant leader, what is the best conflict resolution technique to utilize in this situation?

Avoid getting involved as it isn't relevant to project

Which of the following refers to the progressive elaboration of project requirements and the ongoing activity in which the team collaboratively reviews, updates, and writes requirements to satisfy the needs of the customer request?

Backlog refinement

Rather than writing requirements in user story format, Bill continued to craft detailed use case descriptions. While these descriptions were useful, they took him four times longer to produce than the user stories created by other business analysts on the project, and they still needed to be confirmed with the business.

Being creatures of habit

What would a member of an agile delivery team focus on the most?

Building the product increment

Story points are a unit of measure for expressing the overall size of a user story. When we estimate with story points we assign a point value to each item. Which of the following is the correct scale for estimating story points?

Cardinal scale

A defect has been identified in the program you have worked on for the past three iterations. You aren't sure when the defect was created, but you know that the influencing factor was that someone else worked on earlier strings of the code while you were gone on vacation, which is a very common practice. What is the reason for the defect?

Common cause

How frequently should the backlog be groomed?

Continuously/ongoing

Which of the following is a form of agile review?

Customer demos

When a problem arises, what steps are needed?

Diagnose the problem, decide what to do about it, and fix the problem (remove the bad work and redo it).

The team is slicing their user stories. What are they doing?

Dividing stories into pieces that can be completed in one iteration

The Kanban pull system means that:

Each time a work item is completed, the next work item is "pulled" into that stage of the process.

We put risk mitigation stories in the backlog to:

Ensure that risk reduction efforts are done in the early iterations.

Stories and features are prioritized in the risk-adjusted backlog based on their:

Expected monetary value or business value

During a meeting with your sponsor, they bring up the fact that on your new Agile project your reporting has dropped off to the point where they barely have any information compared to Waterfall projects. How will you explain this to your sponsor?

Explain progressive elaboration and last responsible moment Agile philosophies to the sponsor.

Which of the following would NOT be an advantage of limiting your team's work in progress?

It maximizes resource utilization to make processes work more efficiently.

You've been asked to recommend how a team should transition to using agile. How would you reply?

Learn agile values and principles and use them to guide which practices to adopt in your situation.

You've been asked to recommend how a team should transition to using agile. How would you reply?

Learn agile values and principles and use them to guide which practices to adopt in your situation.

For an Agile project manager, active listening is an important aspect to practicing adaptive leadership. If a stakeholder is talking to you about an issue, what should be your primary focus?

Listening to what the person is saying and assessing the information

Self-organizing teams are best characterized by their ability to:

Make local decisions

Mary's estimates omitted any allowance for remediation work after the testing of the user interface, but she did include the allowance in her estimates for testing the reports.

Making mistakes

Tim's live-year financial forecasts did not include inflation, although including inflation is a standard company practice.

Making mistakes

As an agile leader, what would be your highest priority?

Making sure the team members understand what the project is trying to accomplish

The relationship between leadership and management in agile methods is:

Management and leadership are used together.

During an ESVP activity, each participant anonymously reports his or her attitude toward the retrospective as an Explorer, Shopper, Vacationer, or Prisoner. Who are the prisoners?

People who feel that they've been forced to attend and would rather be doing something else.

Which of the following Agile events is not primarily designed to generate feedback on either project approach or project deliverable?

Planning poker

After the first stakeholder demo of the real-time language translator robot that swore at the CEO, Tom switched back to playing prerecorded samples in subsequent demos, though the team agreed it was not nearly as much fun

Preferring to fail conservatively Being creatures of habit

Jim fared little better than Bill. While most of Jim's requirements were in user story format, whenever he encountered something tricky, he reverted back to use case formats.

Preferring to fail conservatively Being creatures of habit Being inconsistent

In Scrum, the definition of done is created with the input of everyone except the:

Process owner

Agile approaches do not require developing a formal scope management plan or a WBS. In Agile projects, which of the following makes up the high-level project scope?

Product backlog

Three new risk events have been identified in your current iteration. Your analysis shows that two of the risk events expected monetary value are higher than the features on which you are working, and one is not very impactful at all. What should you do if you are the product owner?

Put the two highly impactful risk events at the top of the riskadjusted backlog.

An Agile team working on a data center migration project has accrued substantial technical debt. What should be done now?

Re-prioritize the backlog.

What is one cause of technical debt?

Refactoring that hasn't been done on a regular basis

You are leading an Agile team developing an enterprise automation system. You have scheduled the next project iteration planning meeting with the team members next week. Which of the following action items must be completed prior to the iteration planning meeting?

Refine the backlog

According to the Agile Manifesto, project teams should continuously review the project processes to determine their effectiveness and optimize them. An Agile team implements this principle through:

Retrospectives

An Agile team benefits from traditional project management approaches such as lessons learned gathering, analysis and documentation; and Lean approaches such as Kaizen (continuous improvement) during:

Retrospectives

As an agile team leader, you want to avoid:

Rewarding individual goals at the expense of project goals

Expected Monetary Value (EMV) =

Risk Impact (in dollars) × Risk Probability (as a percentage)

Your team is working together to brainstorm potential risk events on a project, and they are using a technique that allows them to focus on what is going well now versus what isn't going so well now. Which of the following tools are they using?

SWOT

An Agile team is currently planning the next project iteration and breaking down user stories into tasks. Some of these tasks cannot be estimated accurately due to uncertainty and some knowledge work is required to gain further knowledge. What do you recommend?

Schedule spikes.

The agile triangle of constraints is said to be inverted from the traditional triangle because it allows:

Scope to vary while time and cost are fixed

An Agile team wants to setup an information radiator that will be utilized to manage the product and sprints backlog, and show the flow of work and its bottlenecks. Which Agile tool would you recommend to achieve this objective?

Scrum Board

The four primary roles of a servant leader include [which of the following]:

Shielding team members from interruptions

During a retrospective, you have asked your team to write cards to represent memorable, personally meaningful, or otherwise significant events during the iteration and then post them in a chronological order. What have you asked your team to develop?

Timeline

An agile team is refactoring their code. Why are they doing this?

To make the code easier to update and maintain

Your team is tasked with developing a breakthrough medical device, and they don't know what the final product will look like. How would you advise them to proceed?

Try the most promising approaches in short iterations and learn as you go.

Your team needs to keep the product owner and other stakeholders informed about how the project is progressing. What tools will you use for this?

Velocity chart and risk burndown graph

Your sponsor is asking about tailoring the company's newly adopted agile methodology. Your advice should be:

We should try it first, then consider tailoring it.

An Agile team is managing its work in progress on a Kanban board. Recently the WIP limits have been met and the team cannot pull further work from the "Ready" column into the "WIP". What is the question all team members need to address in the next daily stand-up?

What do we do as a team to move work from the "WIP" column to the "Done" column?