PMI-ACP : PMI Agile Certified Practitioner : Part 30
-
Midway through an iteration, an agile team learns that a team member will be unavailable for the next two iterations.
As a high-performance team, what should the team do?
- Raise an impediment that resource tasks will be blocked, and notify the product owner
- Ask the delivery manager for a temporary resource
- Ask the scrum master to assign that team member’s tasks to the next available resource
- Assume the team member’s tasks to meet iteration goals, and notify the product owner
-
Senior management is frustrated at the lack of a detailed implementation plan that shows exactly when the project will end and when all requirements will be met. The team has been using a rolling wave planning approach so far on the project.
How should the agile practitioner explain to senior management the benefits of this approach?
- It ensures a consistent level of details is available in the project schedule
- It prevents a wasteful buildup of requirements inventory that may never be processed
- It provides a concrete definition of project scope, cost and duration
- It allows the team to lock down the stories to be included in a release
-
More details for a story are required before the upcoming sprint planning meeting.
What should the scrum master do?
- Email the product owner requesting detailed story specifications and wait for a response
- Gather the details from the team members before sprint planning
- Schedule a story grooming session with the product owner before sprint planning
- Conduct a planning poker session with the team
-
The scrum master for a large project must provide an estimate of what can be delivered in six months.
What should the scrum master do?
- Commit to a specific feature set for delivery
- Explain that a commitment will be provided after planning
- Have the team estimate in story points to commit to a specific set of features
- Use the team’s historical velocity to calculate a range of features that can be delivered
-
What can an agile team use to prioritize stories?
- Planning poker technique
- Weighted average calculation
- Risk-value quadrant
- INVEST scale
-
An agile team member from a cross-functional team has been unable to complete assignments due to tasks assigned by the functional manager.
What should the Scrum Master do?
- Dismiss the team member
- Discuss the situation with the functional manager
- Report the functional manager to the project sponsor
- Demand that the functional manager respects the project charter
-
The team is in the middle of an iteration and there is an urgent request for a small change to be introduced to the committed scope. Unless this change is accepted, there is no value to the customers during this iteration.
What must the agile practitioner do?
- Add the new change request as a new user story in the product backlog for the upcoming iteration
- Evaluate the impact of the change request and let the team and product owner decide and re-prioritize based on value
- Recommend cancelling the current iteration and plan the change request into the next iteration
- Recommend that the product owner add this change request as a user story to the backlog for the current iteration
-
During a mature agile team’s planning meeting, a team member proposes a new framework that would considerably reduce implementation time. However, the team lacks the confidence to try the new framework.
To help the team gain confidence, what should the agile practitioner suggest?
- Develop a spike
- Create an Ishikawa diagram
- Perform a pre-mortem analysis
- Complete a variance and trend analysis
-
An agile practitioner wants to ensure that stakeholders have current information about a project’s progress.
What should the agile practitioner do?
- Regularly circulate an updated, detailed version of the project plan
- Frequently update the online project management office (PMO) repository site
- Invite the stakeholders to daily stand ups
- Post a project board in an area where all can view it
-
A product owner, new to the role, is very enthusiastic about an agile project with an energetic team.
What should be done first to ensure successful delivery of the product?
- Hold a meeting with the team and the product owner to develop the team charter, working agreement, guiding principles, and product vision
- Ask the product owner to create the project vision and charter, and then discuss the guiding principles with the team
- Hold a meeting during which the team can present the project charter, high-level project plan, and team values to the product owner
- Send the product owner to formal product-owner training where the product owner can learn how to create a product vision
-
Prior to a retrospective, discussions among team members indicate conflict. An agile practitioner wants to ensure an open and safe environment during the retrospective.
What should the agile practitioner do?
- Review established ground rules with the team
- Ask team members specific questions to identify the cause
- Encourage the team to continue working to maintain the iteration’s schedule
- Meet with the product owner and stakeholders to discuss the issue
-
Two similar stories, A and B, are estimated at 3 story points. Story C, is estimated at 8 points. After an iteration in which A and C were completed, it is found that story A took much longer than story C.
What should the agile practitioner do?
- Assign story B more than 8 story points so to provide a better estimate
- Add points to story B’s iteration to account for the error but keep story B at 3 points
- Assign more resources to story B to bring it in line with the estimate
- Reestimate all stories including values for A, B and C
-
During a current sprint, a team member asks permission from the scrum master to investigate an alternative design approach.
What should the scrum master do?
- Discourage the team member from deviating from the plan and document the request during the retrospective
- Encourage the team member to research the issue and present the findings during the retrospective
- Discourage the team member from using experimentation/spikes unless it is fully developed and accounts for a variety of use cases
- Encourage the team member to use experimentation/spikes for continuous improvement and help the team understand why it is important
-
An agile team member identifies a potential problem within the project team.
How should the team’s coach react?
- Document the problem, escalate to the project manager, and develop a solution for the team
- Add the problem to the backlog and assign resolution to a future iteration
- Instruct the team to try to solve the problem within the team
- Perform root cause analysis and report the problem to the product owner
-
The customer needs assistance in determining the efficiency of a set of process activities within the solution.
What should the agile team do?
- Discuss the efficiency at the next iteration retrospective
- Review the process value stream to determine potential improvements
- Review the value the customer receives from the user story to determine backlog priority
- Discuss the performance of the solution at the next sprint review
-
A customer and a product delivery team meet to discuss a product’s attributes, goals, expectations, hypothesis, and high-level needs.
What is a benefit of this meeting?
- The team will learn how its contribution will create product value
- It will enable team acceptance of client priorities
- It will enable the team to see the entire project in one glance
- It will enable the team to ask any questions to the customer upfront
-
While reviewing the sprint burn down during a stand up, the scrum team identifies that they have fallen behind. Upon further discussion, they discover that some quality assurance (QA) team members were unable to use the new automation framework, which caused a bottleneck.
What should the scrum team do?
- For upcoming sprints, have QA team members ensure that their respective skill sets are considered when accepting stories
- Have QA team members with the appropriate skills sets spend extra time to help the team succeed
- Ensure that QA team members who lack the appropriate skill sets sign up for training within the next few weeks
- Ask QA team members experienced with the new automation framework to cross-train the other QA members
-
What should a team do when they complete all sprint goals earlier than expected?
- Begin working on an item in the backlog
- Ask the scrum master to select an item from the backlog on which to work
- Ask the product owner to select an item from the backlog on which to work
- Jointly decide with the scrum master on an item from the backlog on which to work
-
The agile team disagrees with the business stakeholders on completing some epics.
What could help eliminate misunderstandings?
- Agree on requirements with all stakeholders
- Begin planning every four iterations
- Consider previous sprint demo feedback when planning the next sprint
- Include the reasons for the project in the contract
-
During a project meeting, a team is faced with a difficult decision. After discussion and deliberation, the project leader makes the final decision and ends the discussion. This causes a team member to withdraw from future collaboration.
How could the project leader have avoided this?
- Led by example by encouraging the team to engage in consensus-driven decision making
- Iterated the need for agile teams to make quick decisions, then followed up with that team member
- Empowered a team member to facilitate decision making, then made a final decision on behalf of the team
- Refrained from participating in the team’s decision-making process, except to document and communicate results
Subscribe
0 Comments
Newest