Appendix B
Answers to Review Questions

Chapter 1

  1. C. The first value points to focusing more on individuals and collaborations than on a set methodology or tools and techniques.
  2. B. The Agile Alliance was created by a group of software developers who were looking for better ways to manage their projects with a sharper focus on software development.
  3. D. Agile projects involve frequent changes and documentation at the last responsible moment. If a plan is followed to the letter, it doesn’t allow for frequent changes.
  4. D. All methods focus on ways to increase value for the customer by communicating and adapting to changing customer needs.
  5. C. Even though there are specific frameworks like Scrum and XP that help manage projects more effectively, the main goal of Agile is to provide value and continuously learn and improve.
  6. A. It’s not uncommon that people new to Agile frameworks get confused about managing change over formal preplanning, but planning is a big part of Agile project management, just not long-term planning when you know things will change.
  7. A. These pillars also support the Scrum framework and provide a good itemized list of the Agile mindset.
  8. A. This is the biggest difference between Waterfall and Agile. Agile involves planning, but waiting until the last responsible moment to do so. The scope of work isn’t fixed as it is with Waterfall projects.
  9. B. Many organizations are too quick to say something doesn’t work when they don’t get immediate results. Agile is very different from many set processes that helped build out the industrial age, and it is open-ended and flexible. It takes practice and time to integrate.
  10. A. It isn’t recommended to try to create a hybrid approach until all best practices are well understood and have been used. This doesn’t mean that you couldn’t incorporate stand-up meetings on your next Waterfall project. It’s just not recommended to combine full frameworks until everything is well accepted and understood.
  11. B. The Agile Manifesto was the outcome of the meeting in Utah, which was held due to the frustration with current methods of software design and project management.
  12. C. The Agile Manifesto isn’t saying that you should choose one over the other; it is merely suggesting that you should place individuals and your interactions with them over sticking strictly to tools and processes that may or may not be working.
  13. A. Because software design is about providing value to the customer quickly and that value can change frequently, Waterfall isn’t the best method due to heavy preplanning and formal change control systems. While some software projects could be managed with Waterfall, depending on the nature of the project, Agile is better suited for rapid changes and planning at the last responsible moment.
  14. D. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools is the first value of the Agile Manifesto.
  15. A. Responding to change over following a plan is the fourth value in the Agile Manifesto.
  16. B. Working software over comprehensive documentation is the second value in the Agile Manifesto.
  17. C. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation is the third value in the Agile Manifesto.
  18. C. The Declaration of Interdependence states, “We increase return on Investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.”
  19. D. Agile project teams are self-directed and self-managed, but they also have coaching from an Agile project manager to help them maintain the vision of the work and reach consensus as a team on next steps.
  20. A. Agile project teams work best in a colocated environment. While that isn’t always possible, it is suggested that the team colocates on a regular basis or at least for one iteration if they are remote/virtual team members.

Chapter 2

  1. B. Scrum is a lightweight framework that is easy to learn and difficult to do.
  2. A. A retrospective is the final meeting of a sprint, where the team discusses what went well and what didn’t and makes plans for improvements. The other answers are actual outputs or artifacts of the Scrum framework.
  3. D. Sprints are rarely canceled, and if they are it is because the product has become obsolete. Therefore, a sprint would not be canceled in the middle of a project for the other reasons given.
  4. A. All of the other answers represent the core values of XP. Coaching is an important aspect of all Agile methods or frameworks, but it is not unique to core values.
  5. D. Pair programming is a large part of XP, geared to maintain consistency, learning, and communication during programming. One programmer codes, the other oversees, and then they switch.
  6. B. The daily Scrum allows the development team to discuss work in progress, work to be done, and impediments to their progress. The daily Scrum is timeboxed at 15 minutes.
  7. D. Part of being a servant leader is to take on administrative work as needed to keep your team focused on the work in progress. You may also suggest to the stakeholders that asking for too many updates can hinder progress, but in this case option D is the best answer.
  8. C. Daily Scrums are for informational purposes only, and the development team are the only ones to discuss what they have done, what they are doing, and what impediments are in their way. Any others attending the Scrum are silent observers. Other stakeholders can attend but not participate in the discussion. No solutions are generated during the meeting, only information.
  9. C. The product owner’s primary responsibility is to own the product backlog and communicate and redistribute the value as needed.
  10. C. Regardless of the specific framework, all Agile teams are self-organized and self-managed.
  11. A. Retrospectives allow the team to review what went well and what the challenges were during the sprint. This reflection point allows for discussions of continuous improvement for the next sprint.
  12. D. Agile project managers are servants first to their team and practice leadership more so than management. Their job is to coach and support their team.
  13. A. Understanding what “done” is allows the team to plan around the requirements and produce a usable increment at the end of each iteration/sprint.
  14. D. The team is self-directed and self-managed so that they can make decisions about how they will go about creating the result. They communicate regularly to share knowledge.
  15. A. Three questions in each daily Scrum or stand-up meeting are, What did we do yesterday? What we will do today? What impediments are in our way?
  16. B. The product owner is responsible for the product backlog, but it is transparent and open to the entire team, who helps to determine what items of value will be delivered in the next iteration/sprint.
  17. C. The daily Scrum or stand-up meeting is timeboxed for 15 minutes every day. This keeps it short and to the point while updating the entire development team on what is occurring during the iteration/sprint.
  18. B. The grooming of the backlog process is done by the team, but the product owner is responsible for pushing items of value to the front. The team will select from the backlog work that can be accomplished in the iteration based on current value.
  19. B. The sprint backlog represents the chosen items the development team will work on during the sprint. They will select what they believe they can accomplish and what they believe will produce a usable increment at the end.
  20. A. The daily standup meetings or daily Scrums are designed to provide up-to-date information to the development team about work completed or in progress as well as anything that is preventing them from being totally successful right now.

Chapter 3

  1. D. The MoSCoW approach to determining value is based on brainstorming what is the most important feature today and that it must be in the increment, following by what should be, what could be, and what won’t be.
  2. C. The Pareto principle was created by Vilfredo Pareto as a way to study distribution of wealth in Italy. It was adapted by Joseph Juran to determine what causes have the most effect on the results. Identify those causes and you can fix the defects.
  3. D. In a Lean environment, determining waste in approach and result is the best way to remove it from the process. Waste is the opposite of value because it provides no value and instead produces problems in the increment and/or the process to create it.
  4. A. In Lean, too many handoffs of pieces or parts of work create numerous problems regarding the quality and to the process, and it is considered one of the seven wastes of Lean.
  5. B. A Kanban board is one of the most effective ways to show information and radiate it out to stakeholders. The Kanban board is a visual board displaying Kanban cards and using a pull system to replace work that has been deployed and pull more into the work in progress (WIP). Kanban boards are like Scrum boards, except in Scrum new work isn’t added until the next sprint.
  6. A. Limiting work in progress (WIP) allows the team to focus only on the work that is to be accomplished and not pull any additional work in until the team is ready to perform it.
  7. A. Originally, Feature-Driven Development was created to counteract a more Waterfall type of methodology. Because larger teams were working on an increment or result, it was necessary to compartmentalize work by feature so that there wasn’t any confusion or duplicate work occurring on larger teams.
  8. C. Increasing criticality is the best way to manage projects that have a sliding scale of noncritical to critical work being accomplished. Larger projects with more intricate results need a heavier method than one that needs a lighter framework to produce to spec.
  9. D. All frameworks and Agile methods are tolerant of changes and, in fact, expect changes to occur. This allows for flexibility in the design to best meet the needs of the client and to help the team adapt as needed to produce the increment.
  10. D. Servant leadership is different from management in the sense that you will take on administrative work as needed to help your team be most successful. This could be anything from doing updates to status, or even coaching the other stakeholders in your Agile framework so that they don’t inadvertently add more work to the team’s plate.
  11. C. Notice that the only answer that doesn’t include I is the correct answer. Active listening as a servant leader is making sure that you are there for the team member, not thinking about yourself or what you need to do next. Once you have listened, you can then coach the team member through the issue.
  12. D. Adaptive leadership is less about management and more about inspiration, active listening, coaching when needed, and helping your team to be more successful. This is a major trend in Agile projects and heavily tested on the PMI-ACP exam.
  13. B. Colocation is highly important for Agile project teams. Even if the team is remote or virtual, it is recommended that the team be colocated for at least two iterations to build as a team and to focus on how to get the work accomplished as a team.
  14. C. Osmotic communication is part of being colocated. It allows everyone to hear everything being communicated, and the individual can choose to listen if it relates to them or choose to ignore it if it serves no purpose. This communication method is highly regarded as one of the best knowledge transfer techniques.
  15. A. Being a good leader is much more than seating your team together and having daily stand-up meetings. It’s practicing motivating your team when needed, compensating and celebrating successes, and encouraging your team to be self-directed and self-managed while taking on administrative work as needed.
  16. C. Even though this may not be the case in your current environment, it is important to note that Agile project managers spend most of their time communicating with their teams, product owners, customers, and other stakeholders.
  17. A. Lean was created to help with the supply chain in Toyota manufacturing plants and was later adapted for Agile frameworks as a complementary process rather than an actual methodology.
  18. C. The traditional cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act in Waterfall was replaced by the ASD framework as a way to improve continuously in an adaptive way.
  19. D. The Agile project manager’s role is as a servant leader. The management tasks are done, but to a lesser degree than with Waterfall project managers. It is more important to serve your team as a leader. Your team is self-directed and self-managed. This concept is difficult for stakeholders new to Agile project management.
  20. B. Using Kanban or Scrum boards is one of the best ways to show visually what work is in the backlog, what work is in progress, and what work has been done. Most progress is shown visually throughout the iterations in one form or another.
  21. B. Much like the initiation phase in a Waterfall project, Iteration Zero allows the team to prepare for the iterations to come by creating a plan for the process and identifying the team roles and responsibilities and to determine officially the process that will be used.

Chapter 4

  1. B. Osmotic communication is a way to absorb information even if you are not involved in the actual conversation. That information can be taken as important or not depending on the needs of the individual.
  2. D. Wireframes allow the team to work through a type of prototyping in an easy and low-tech way by drawing or plotting out what the increment might look like.
  3. C. Even though options B through D help organizations get to the point that a charter could be created, net present value is the only one that has all of the information in it and can provide the best overall determination of fiscal health when selecting a project.
  4. A. Even though you could say that it is written in the format of a user story, the story itself is so vague that there isn’t any way in which to direct the conversation. It’s hard to negotiate features or really understand what the customer wants.
  5. D. You are asking your customer for a very small, concise explanation of what success looks like. Even though elevator statements should be about 30 seconds long, a tweet cuts out all of the noise and gets to the bottom line in 140 characters or less.
  6. C. The only answer that isn’t self-focused is option C. The key to active listening is not thinking about what you are going to do or say next but to remind yourself to focus on the message you are receiving.
  7. B. A user story that is too large isn’t going to be effective. Even after it is broken down from the epic level, too much information in a user story doesn’t follow the INVEST process of creating effective user stories.
  8. C. In this case, all things have been calculated into the NPV equation, and if a decision needs to be made strictly on NPV, you would always choose the highest number with the most ROI.
  9. A. A wireframe is a low-fidelity mock-up of what the user story represents or what success looks like.
  10. B. Option B is the best answer because Agile project charters are more flexible in their approach and documentation by providing the who, what, where, when, and how as you know it today.
  11. A. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize yourself in other people’s experiences.
  12. C. The correct format for user stories is:

    As ____________ I need ____________ so that I can ________________________.

    The format is important, but not as important as making sure the story is able to be tested, negotiated, and well understood.

  13. A. User story workshops are a way to determine the user stories over the period of the project, but they are most important to engage stakeholders in what success looks like and to gain an understanding of what the customer wants through communication and collaboration.
  14. A. Payback period tracks the amount of time outgoing expenditures are recouped before a profit is made. It isn’t the most reliable selection technique, and it would need to be utilized in a net present value (NPV) formula with additional information to truly be relevant.
  15. D. The project charter is an excellent jumping-off point, but it really is only describing things on a very high level. It isn’t until you start working directly with the customer that your team can begin to figure out what success looks like.
  16. C. Even though mirroring isn’t something you’ll likely see on the PMI-ACP exam, communication surely is. Mirroring it is an important aspect of effective communication. This study guide will prepare you for the exam, but there are other key points that are useful in your day-to-day work life, and mirroring is one of them.
  17. A. An Agile project charter is more flexible in nature because the scope of work isn’t set in the beginning, so determining full-blown schedules, budgets, and risk is much more difficult to accomplish. Therefore, Agile project charters wouldn’t contain this amount of information.
  18. C. A tweet can be created to gain an understanding of what the customer wants in a concise way.
  19. A. Until your team knows the definition of done, it is virtually impossible to build a working or viable product or service because there isn’t an end in sight.
  20. C. A persona is a way to gain valuable insight into the customer’s needs. It is sometimes developed around a fictitious character as a way to work through a similar situation and gain a better understanding of what the customer or end users want and need without yet knowing the customer very well. Or, it can be based on the customer themselves.

Chapter 5

  1. B. The gulf of misunderstanding occurs when the customer and the team misunderstand the requirements. It is often the cause of disagreement on direction and on features/functions of the increment.
  2. D. This is called “strategic avoidance.” Many people have differing opinions about news stories, and the Agile project manager shouldn’t get involved as it isn’t relevant to project work.
  3. C. Even though this could describe an Agile team, all teams go through periods of adjustment before performing as a self-directed team. The Agile project manager is much more of a servant leader than a manager when a team is self-directed and self-managed.
  4. A. The product owner is using good negotiation techniques. It’s important to be able to give value to the customer, but occasionally it’s important to negotiate for the most important features and do away with the ones that don’t serve a purpose.
  5. C. Obviously, which resolution strategy would work best in each scenario depends on the conflict situation. If, in general terms, you are asked what is the best or longest-lasting strategy, the correct answer would be confronting or collaboration.
  6. B. Since your team is in the performing phase of team development, they are working together and may only need coaching here and there, and only if they ask for it.
  7. B. Having your team be colocated is generally the best setup for team space. Even though it isn’t always possible to do so, colocation is recommended as a best practice in Agile environments.
  8. C. Having your team colocated in one team space improves communication and allows individuals to overhear information and choose to retain or discard it through osmotic communication. It also builds relationships and trust, but that only happens with improvement in communication.
  9. C. Storming is a natural occurrence with newer teams. It is important for the coach/Scrum Master to coach the team through it.
  10. D. Removing roadblocks and taking on administrative work is a key aspect to practicing adaptive leadership.
  11. C. Engaging stakeholders in the definition of done and helping them determine what success looks like is a valuable way to manage stakeholder expectations.
  12. D. Active listening is a large part of effective communication and stakeholder engagement. It’s best to listen to what the stakeholder is saying rather than thinking about what you will do next or how to solve their problem.
  13. D. In this situation, it is unnecessary to step in to help resolve the disagreement. Your team is collectively disagreeing, and it is working toward a solution. Unless you are asked to help, it’s better to let them work through it on their own.
  14. D. The Project Management Institute’s Professional Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct describes mandatory skills, which include not breaking the law and not discriminating, and aspirational skills, such as communication, negotiation, and motivation.
  15. D. Smoothing helps everyone focus on what things they have in common and what may be necessary to work on before any collaboration can occur. When used alone, smoothing is only a short-term fix, but it may be necessary in a heated exchange situation.
  16. D. Even though questions about Maslow’s theory aren’t something you’ll likely see on your PMI-ACP exam, having the ability to motivate effectively is important to servant and adaptive leadership. This study guide will prepare you for the exam, but there are other key points that are useful in your day-to-day work, and motivational theory is one of them.
  17. B. Negotiations that are effective result in a win-win situation for all those involved. In this case, the team explained their side and the product owner explained why they thought their point was valid. In the end, the team determined that they could add one more story but not two. Both sides walked away with something in the exchange, and it was settled appropriately.
  18. A. Good interpersonal skills are necessary to engage stakeholders and to have the emotional intelligence to work with them on determining value. Being an adaptive leader also involves interpersonal skill sets.
  19. C. Engaging your stakeholders doesn’t mean doing everything they say. In fact, a good servant leader would listen to their concerns but also explain how a self-directed team works together to estimate and protect the team from interruptions.
  20. C. There are a couple of things going on here. First, the product owner is in charge of the backlog, and stakeholders should respect that. Next, adding a feature because the stakeholder finds it valuable may not match up with the customer’s needs. Finally, in Scrum, no new user stories are added in the middle of a sprint.

Chapter 6

  1. B. Velocity in the first several iterations/sprints will vary and then increase the amount of story points that can be accomplished as the team gets further into the project. Eventually, the velocity will plateau and then the team can most effectively forecast completion.
  2. C. At this point, early in the iterations and with everything fluctuating, it’s best to get an average and use that to forecast. In this case, the team would round up to 15 iterations, since partial credit isn’t going to work.
  3. D. This question includes the word except, meaning that everything is correct except option D. Decision delays are not applied to taking an epic and breaking it down to a user story level. Even if that were true, the correct order would be taking something that is course-grained and breaking it down to a fine-grained level.
  4. C. Ideal time is basically a duration of time that something would take if you didn’t have any distractions at all, meaning that in a 40-hour work week, you didn’t do anything else except work on your project. Ideal time isn’t an effective way to plan.
  5. C. The format in which user stories are written include these three variables:

    As _________________ I want/need _________________ so that I can _________________________.

  6. D. Backlog grooming or refinement is the act of the product owner sorting the backlog by priority. The development team may be involved in this process, and it usually is, but it is the responsibility of the product owner to do so, and everyone else will respect their decisions.
  7. C. For the most part, if you were to go hierarchically, that would be the order of decomposition. Just like anything in Agile, it depends on your team and how you decompose work, whether you work with themes or just epics. It is also the best answer from all the options, since many answers use the words task and/or sequencing.
  8. D. A story map gives the team a visual representation of the work that they are going to do and what success looks like.
  9. A. A definition of done is necessary so that everyone has a specific understanding of what the result will be so that they can create it and know when it has been created and is finished.
  10. C. A persona is used by the team to understand the customer or end users in a way that makes them more relatable. Sometimes, a placeholder name or person is used to help describe what an end user might need from the deliverables.
  11. C. Velocity is the amount of work a team can accomplish in an iteration. It is calculated by how many story points were selected and how many were achieved during an iteration.
  12. D. When you divide 201 by the current velocity of 50, you get 4.02. The most logical way to calculate how many iterations are left in this case is to round up to five since partial work doesn’t count and you have already attained a stabilized velocity.
  13. C. It happens. Not everything will always be completed in every iteration, no matter how well you plan. If there is leftover work or there are story points, they will be put back into the backlog and sorted by priority. Typically, that work would be put into the next iteration.
  14. A. Timeboxes are used for a variety of Agile activities, including the iteration length, planning meetings, backlog refinement, spikes, and stand-up meetings.
  15. C. Iteration Zero, or sprint zero, allows a team that is perhaps newer to Agile and doesn’t have a process intact yet to develop their process, or if a seasoned team determines that they need a discovery iteration to develop the best approach, they would use Iteration Zero.
  16. B. Ideal time is time that is spent without interruptions and isn’t an effective way to estimate.
  17. D. The product owner will be the person responsible for the backlog. Even though the team may help with clarification or backlog refinement, the product owner owns the backlog and determines priority.
  18. B. A master list of visible work is a backlog, and it is a living document that is reviewed, reorganized, and reprioritized by the product owner while grooming or refining the backlog.
  19. A. Agile teams apply a certain amount of story points based on relative sizing to determine just how big the work is. They then use that information to plan how many points they can accomplish. Lessons learned, while not a key term in Agile, is an apt description of how teams learn from the past and apply it to the present. Velocity will eventually stabilize based on better estimates.
  20. A. In this case, Bob may not understand the ins and outs of the technology, and because of the lack of knowledge about the work, it may seem bigger to Bob than to his teammates. In this case, Bob is an outlier and would need to explain why he chose 10 instead of 5. The team would then discuss and vote again.
  21. C. If the team averages 10 points a sprint, and that is the maximum they can do, they would have three more sprints left to accommodate all of the work without partial work done in a sprint. The priority would be A and B, then C and E, and then D.

Chapter 7

  1. A. Generalized specialists are excellent for Agile teamwork because the individual is an expert in their field but has additional skill sets and knowledge that can benefit the team.
  2. B. If your team is performing, it is your role to be a servant leader, and if your team asks for or needs help, you provide it. Otherwise, you act as more of a facilitator.
  3. A. The concept of Shu Ha Ri describes the progression from obeying the rules of new skills and then branching out a bit to something that suits you without breaking the rules. Finally, in Shu Ha Ri you achieve skill mastery where you can perform the skill in any way that it needs to be performed.
  4. B. Colocation is highly recommended, if possible, for the team. Even if the team is virtual, it is recommended that they be colocated for planning and at least one if not two iterations.
  5. C. Osmotic communication is the main reason. Obviously, some of the other reasons are relevant in colocation as well, but the main reason is to improve communication.
  6. B. Since your team is in the performing phase of team development, they are working together and may only need coaching here and there as a team. Typically, the best time to do so is during planning and retrospectives.
  7. C. Having your team be colocated is generally the best setup for team space, but even when the team is colocated someone may need privacy for a phone call or to work in silence when thinking through a difficult technical issue. Caves or common rooms can be provided for team members working on the same project(s).
  8. B. The only guarantee in this model is the guarantee of safety rather than support. The support piece goes without saying, but having a safe environment in which to improve skills, ask questions, and learn allows for effective coaching.
  9. B. Velocity fluctuates on any project, but typically the biggest fluctuations are in the beginning, and eventually the amount of work increases and levels off.
  10. A. A burn down chart is used to show how much work has been completed, and it can help the team determine how much time the project will take. A burn up chart tracks work completed, but it also shows changes in scope and how that affects the ideal burn.
  11. A. To determine how many iterations remain, the team would take an average of all of the iterations and divide it into the remaining points. In this case, the team would probably round up to 13.
  12. B. Burn down, burn up, or velocity tracking charts are the best information radiators to present information on performance.
  13. D. Most Agile projects do not use Gantt charts, unless they are using a tailored method that needs that type of reporting. In this case, reporting is best served in a highly visual way that is easy to understand.
  14. A. Caves and common rooms are useful for colocated teams when they need a bit of privacy or need to work on something project-specific but need quiet to do so.
  15. D. It’s a best practice to try to colocate all team members for planning and at least one iteration, if possible.
  16. B. This question pertains to actual virtual team members, and while video calls are great, the team is better suited for creating their own mission statements and ground rules in the beginning. That will make future video calls much easier.
  17. C. Osmotic communication is realistic for colocated teams, and if the team space is set up correctly, this type of communication distribution and collaborative learning is easier.
  18. B. Part of being a good coach is to provide a safe environment in which the team can make mistakes and learn from them. If the team asks for coaching, or if you see an opportunity or need for coaching during a retrospective, then it is perfectly within reason to provide it at that point.
  19. C. Burn down charts provide a visual of iteration performance and allow the team to estimate when the project may be completed.
  20. D. Burn up charts allow the team to track performance visually while also tracking changes in the scope of work that could affect their velocity or completion of stories in an iteration.

Chapter 8

  1. D. The entire team includes the product owner, the development team, and the Agile project manager as well as other stakeholders—even the customer or sponsor. Inevitably, the product owner owns the backlog and needs to prioritize value. Nonetheless, they don’t do that in a vacuum: There is much discussion and interaction when deciding how to determine what is valuable.
  2. C. The gulf of misunderstanding can occur when value has not been clarified or either the customer or the team misunderstands what will be created on the project. To avoid this misunderstanding, the team will use a variety of techniques to reach consensus on what they are building and why.
  3. A. Giving the team and other stakeholders colored dots and allowing them to vote on their choices of features and functions allows for discussion and consensus to be reached.
  4. C. The 100-point method is designed to allow for prioritization in a facilitated way. This allows everyone to determine what they feel is most important and score it accordingly.
  5. B. What this is describing is something new and innovative that hasn’t been done before. That describes an exciter that the customer wants included in the next release.
  6. B. Using a more flexible type of contract on Agile projects allows for updates or change in scope without any penalty or legal breach of contract.
  7. C. This project is over budget because the cost variance is determined by comparing the earned value to the actual cost. Less work was done and you paid more for it. For the schedule variance, more work was done than planned, so the project is ahead of schedule.
  8. A. The earned value technique will allow for a comparative approach between the scope of work planned to be accomplished and what it has cost to accomplish that in order to obtain the cost performance index, or CPI.
  9. C. In this case, the question is asking for the schedule variance. The formula for that is earned value − planned value. Because less work was accomplished than planned, this project is behind schedule by $400.00, so the answer would be a negative value. The other answers are either positive numbers or indexes obtained by using the formulas incorrectly.
  10. A. In this question, all answers could be, in some ways, correct. The best answer here is that the customer isn’t understanding your technical jargon and/or why what they want will not be in the final increment. This is due to the gulf of misunderstanding. If Kano analysis had been performed, there would be a better understanding rather than misunderstanding.
  11. D. A service level agreement allows for terms and conditions to be determined in the beginning so that future changes in scope won’t result in renegotiations throughout the project.
  12. B. Monopoly Money is a great way to see how a sponsor or customer would spend their money if given the entire budget to disperse.
  13. C. In this case, the must-haves versus the won’t-haves points to prioritization using the MoSCoW approach.
  14. D. The cost performance index is a rating of efficiency on the project. Any result over a 1.0 shows that the project is under budget and essentially getting more work accomplished for less money.
  15. C. A fixed-price contract is good for organizations that are trying to control costs and have a good understanding of the scope of work. There is less flexibility for scope changes, but cost risk is lower.
  16. A. Key performance indicators will vary depending on what the return on investment looks like in an organization. Typically, KPIs relate to project and team performance.
  17. A. Setting SMART goals is a large piece of improving all aspects of goal setting.
  18. C. The SMART mnemonic acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable/assignable, realistic, and time-based.
  19. D. This response shows a cost performance index under 1.0; that is, the budget is only at 80 percent efficiency when Jamal expected 100 percent.
  20. D. There isn’t anything that points to a specific time frame for Carol to attain her goal.
  21. B. You would need to obtain the planned value, or what you thought you would accomplish at this point in the schedule, and divide it into the earned value, which is how much was accomplished. The formula is EV / PV.
  22. B. Over time and use, exciters become less exciting and fade into the satisfier area.
  23. D. In an Agile project, it is typical that the cost and time would be more rigid and the scope of work would be more flexible. The opposite is true in a Waterfall type of project.
  24. B. Net present value is used to help organizations make decisions based on the payback period, internal rate of return, and present values. The higher the net present value, the higher the expected return on investment.
  25. A. Dot voting, or creating a dotmocracy, allows the team to express their opinions and vote on the options that they think are valuable. This allows for transparent communication and consensus to be reached.

Chapter 9

  1. A. Progressive elaboration is the process by which information is learned and then added to the existing plan. Because changes are expected, the team will elaborate on the plan with new information when it is identified.
  2. B. The strategy of rolling wave planning incorporates the model of replanning multiple times and waiting until the last responsible moment to put together those plans. As waves of information roll in, we can then plan accordingly.
  3. D. Course-grained requirements are broken down to fine-grained requirements once more information is discovered, not the other way around.
  4. C. If a risk event is more impactful financially than the ROI gain of a feature, the project may be cancelled.
  5. A. A risk burn down chart will show the progression of mitigation efforts. If the project is going well, the chart will trend down.
  6. D. Both sprint/iteration and risk information can be represented on a burn down chart. Risk burn down charts are typically separate, but for both, a burn down is what is represented to show the scope of work completed and risk mitigation efforts working.
  7. D. Risk-based spikes are special stories that are created and designed to remove or reduce risk from the iteration.
  8. B. The product owner would need to be made aware that a spike is needed and approve the spike to move forward. The entire team doesn’t usually work on spikes. It is usually one or two developers.
  9. C. Agile projects use progressive elaboration and the strategy of rolling wave planning rather than comprehensive upfront plans and documentation.
  10. C. When you’re creating your risk-adjusted backlog, the sequence would be determined by the financial values of both risk and features, and the one that is most impactful financially would be worked on first.
  11. D. When needed, you may coach your team on the right direction to go. In this case, they may need to perform a spike to figure out their strategy or create a proof of concept.
  12. B. Chris should discuss performing a risk-based spike with the product owner and move forward with approval to determine if the risk can be mitigated.
  13. B. Tech debt would need to be paid later in the project because the easiest solution was implemented, but maybe it was not the best solution at the time.
  14. C. Gail is refactoring the code to make the code easier to read and edit as well as to clean it up without impacting the actual performance of the code.
  15. B. Expected monetary value allows for an analysis of risk events to determine the monetary value of risk at its current assessed probability and impact.
  16. B. A risk burn down chart shows project or iteration risk. As steps are taken to mitigate or remove risk from the project, the risks should be burning out, and therefore the chart should trend down.
  17. B. Asking “why” five times in a row allows the team to identify root causes of risk they might have missed otherwise without further discussion of the causes.
  18. D. The most impactful financially would be placed at the top of a risk-adjusted backlog. In this case, Risk D is more financially impactful than the rest.
  19. A. The formula is probability × impact. In this case, it would be 0.30 × 10,000 = $3,000.
  20. B. The product owner would need to place the highest-impacting risks at the top of the risk-adjusted backlog since they are financially damaging and would need to be mitigated before working on the features currently on the backlog.
  21. C. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It allows for a specific focus on what is going well or not so well in the present that could impact the future.
  22. B. Special causes are always a surprise and can lead to defects. Common causes are events that we expect in every project.
  23. A. Tech debt is what happens when a development team writes code that is easy to implement in the short term instead of attempting to apply the best overall solution up front.
  24. A. If it is a common practice to have more than one person work on a feature, then inevitable human error will create a defect at some point in the project.
  25. B. A secondary risk is when you implement a response to a risk event and create a totally different risk. It is always a surprise, and it will require a workaround to manage it.

Chapter 10

  1. C. Value stream maps are an excellent visual way to plot out the process and determine where there is waste that may need to be adjusted or removed.
  2. A. Lead time reflects the total amount of time that it takes from a customer request until the customer reviews the final result, and cycle time is the development life cycle from a work request that the team receives up to the execution and completion of that specific request—the life cycle of the increment.
  3. D. Value stream maps are a way to represent current processes visually and look for better ways to streamline those processes.
  4. D. The way to calculate process cycle efficiency is to take the valuable time of 20 minutes and divide into it the total time of 70. That will give you a percentage of efficiency of 28 percent. 20/70 = 28% rounded down.
  5. C. Premortems involve asking questions about how the product or project could fail in advance of the execution of the work in order to determine what problems could arise and to fix them before they occur.
  6. D. Retrospectives are timeboxed events that the team attends to look back on the iteration that they just completed to determine if there are any improvements that can be made in the next iteration.
  7. C. Mad, sad, glad is a way that the team can express their feelings on how the iteration went. This can be facilitated or anonymously submitted. Either way, it allows for the generation of conversation, and areas that may need improvement can be discussed.
  8. A. The goal of a retrospective is reflecting on the previous iteration, how the team performed, how the work was executed, how the team’s velocity was in the last iteration, and so on. This allows for transparent communication and action items to be discussed.
  9. A. Addressing all aspects of the iteration helps the team focus on the good and the challenges the team is facing so that workable solutions can be created.
  10. D. Scrum and XP have best practices that are the most compatible with each other, and many teams use a combination of best practices from each to tailor their projects.
  11. B. A premortem meeting is a way that the team can discuss what may occur in the future and work to avoid any potential threats to the iteration.
  12. B. The Agile Alliance is a group dedicated to best practices in Agile project management, and based on a collaboration with the Project Management Institute, the Agile Practice Guide was created.
  13. D. Teams can use a cumulative flow diagram to review the flow of their process and determine where issues could occur or have already transpired. Its visual nature allows the team to make decisions on what to fix and how to fix it.
  14. D. Takt time is used to determine the team’s pace or rhythm during an iteration, and it is used to determine the rate at which the team needs to work to keep up with customer demands.
  15. A. The Theory of Constraints, or TOC, is a way to look for any bottlenecks in the process, identify the cause, work to remove it.
  16. B. ScrumBan is a hybrid approach that incorporates aspects of both Scrum and Kanban as needed, and it was originally created as a way to transition from Scrum to Kanban.
  17. D. An intraspective meeting may be necessary when the team is experiencing a lack of cohesiveness or needing a different direction to go in on the iteration work. Anyone can suggest an intraspective meeting.
  18. B. Your team can calculate their throughput by adding all of the story points together and then dividing by the amount of iterations. In this particular case, the throughput is equal to one of the total points completed in the iteration. It doesn’t always work out that way.
  19. A. When tracking velocity, a team would be working to increase the amount of story points they can accomplish in each iteration as a part of continuous improvements. Lead time, on the other hand, would need to decrease. If lead time decreases and velocity improves, this would show continuous improvements and better overall performance.
  20. B. LeSS is a product development framework that extends some of the confines of Scrum and allows for scaling guidelines without losing the original purpose of Scrum. There are two levels of Large Scale Scrum: LeSS Huge and LeSS Level.
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