Before you look at the answers...

Before you find out how you did on the exam, here are a few ideas to help make the material stick to your brain. Remember, once you look through the answers, you can use these tips to help you review anything you missed.

1. Don’t get caught up in the question.

   If you find yourself a little confused about a question, the first thing you should do is try to figure out exactly what it is the question is asking. It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, especially if the question is really wordy. Sometimes you need to read a question more than once. The first time you read it, ask yourself, “What’s this question really about?”

   Note

   This is especially useful for conflict resolution questions—the ones where you’re presented with a disagreement between team members, and asked how you’d handle it.

2. Try this stuff out on your job.

   Everything you’re learning about for the PMI-ACP® exam is really practical, and based on real-world agile ideas. If you’re actively working on projects, then there’s a really good chance that some of the ideas you’re learning about can be applied to your job. Take a few minutes and think about how you’d use these things to make your projects go more smootly.

3. Write your own questions.

   Is there a concept that you’re just not getting? One of the best ways that you can make it stick to your brain is to write your own question about it! We included Question Clinic exercises in Head First Agile to help you learn how to write questions like the ones you’ll find on the exam.

   Note

   When you write your own question, you do a few things:

   • You reinforce the idea and make it stick to your brain.

   • You think about how questions are structured.

   • By thinking of a real-world scenario where the concept is used, you put the idea in context and learn how to apply it.

   And all that helps you recall it better.!

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1. Answer: B

   This is a case where the product owner is right, and the team member is doing something that is potentially dangerous. The reason that Scrum teams have a product owner role is so that someone can stay on top of all stakeholder communications. There’s nothing wrong with team members working directly with stakeholders, but they should never cut the product owner out of the discussion.

   Note

   Did it bother you that “scrum master” was not capitalized in the exam question? Get used to it! Questions on the actual exam might not have capitaliztion that matches your expectations.

2. Answer: C

   Usability testing is an important way that teams can test their software to make sure it is easy to use, and agile teams conduct frequent reviews by testing the software and incorporating the improvements back into the deliverables. A very common way to perform usability testing is to observe users while they interact with early versions of the software.

   Note

   Capturing user interface requirements and using wireframes to plan the user interface are both valuable ways to improve the usability of the software, and agile teams use both of them. But agile teams also value working software over comprehensive documentation, so they typically opt for usability testing over UI requirements and wireframes.

3. Answer: B

   When problems occur, agile teams work closely with their stakeholders to understand acceptable trade-offs. On a Scrum team, the product owner is responsible for interacting with the stakeholders to help them understand how the project is going. So when a problem happens on a Scrum project that will impact what the team delivers, the product owner needs to meet with the stakeholder and discuss exactly how the team will proceed. Agile teams work with their stakeholders to maintain a shared understanding of important trade-offs that affect delivery, which helps build a mutual trust between them.

   Note

   A spike solution doesn’t make sense here, because the question didn’t mention anything about exploring a potential technical solution.

4. Answer: D

   When teams use a kanban board to visualize their workflow, they use columns to represent workflow steps, and typically use sticky notes or index cards to show individual work items flowing through the process. If items tend to accumulate in one column, it tells the team that step is a potential root cause for the process flow slowing down. The way to fix it is to work with the stakeholders to impose a work in progress (WIP) limit, usually by writing the maximum allowable number of work items for that step.

   Note

   The stakeholders need to be involved because the team will need to change their behavior when the WIP limit for the step is reached—and that often affects the stakeholders. This helps everyone get to the root cause of the flow problem more quickly.

   Did you notice that the practice exam had a LOT of which-is-BEST questions and least-worst-option questions? One of the most difficult aspects of the PMI-ACP® exam is choosing the best answer when several might be correct, or when none seem to be.

5. Answer: D

   Generalizing specialists can come in really handy, and agile teams do everything that they can to help encourage people to broaden their skills. When everyone on the team has a broader skill set, it lets the team do more work with fewer people, and helps them to avoid bottlenecks. Agile teams try to provide as many opportunities as possible for their team members to develop generalized skills. So when there’s an opportunity for a team member to expand their skills—like a tester taking on development work—agile teams take advantage of it.

   Note

   This is especially true of Scrum teams. Because they’re self-organizing, they can make decisions about who can do the work at the last responsible moment.

6. Answer: A

   The main reason for teams to set ground rules is so that they can foster coherence, and continue to increase their collective commitment to the project’s goals and to delivering value to the stakeholders. Teams should always have good, sensible, sound reasons for setting ground rules. So the best way to help the new team member fit in with the new team is to explain those reasons, and encourage him or her to try following the new rule.

   Note

   If there isn’t a good, sensible reason for the rule, then the new team member might be right and the rule might not be a good idea. But that person should still try it out first, because keeping an open mind about the team’s culture is the best way to encourage team coherence.

7. Answer: C

   Leaders on agile teams practice servant leadership. This means making sure that the individual team members get credit for their work, feel appreciated, and get work done. Servant leaders spend a lot of time working behind the scenes to remove roadblocks that will cause problems down the road. Servant leaders do not typically assign work or decide how the team should build their products.

8. Answer: D

   One of the most important aspects of how agile teams manage their requirements is that they gain consensus among the whole team on the definition of “done” for each item in an iteration. Everyone on the team needs to agree on clear and specific acceptance criteria for every feature that they are going to deliver at the end of the iteration. An effective way to reach consensus on acceptance criteria is to use negotiation.

   Note

   A common way for teams to negotiate this is to have “give and take” where the current iteration’s definition of “done” includes some of the work, but agrees to include the rest of the work in a future iteration.

9. Answer: D

   An agile practitioner working directly with multiple stakeholders is in the product owner role. A product owner meets periodically with stakeholders to identify expectations and requirements, and works with the team to help them understand those requirements. In this case, a stakeholder has a requirement, so the product owner’s job is to make sure that the team is knowledgeable about that stakeholder’s needs and expectations.

10. Answer: D

    Once teams have been together long enough to get into the work they sometimes enter a phase—referred to as “storming”—in which team members often develop strong negative opinions about each other’s character. Adaptive leadership, where leaders modify their style based on the stage of group development, tells us that teams in the “storming” phase need supportive leadership, which involves high levels of direction and high levels of support.

    Note

    This question is based on Tuckman’s model of group development and Hershey’s situational leadership model, theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s about how teams form and how leaders should adapt to them. But it’s more important to understand the ideas of what happens to teams when they form and how effective leaders should adapt to them than to remember the names Tuckman or Hershey.

11. Answer: A

    Self-organizing teams plan the work together and make decisions about who does specific tasks at the last responsible moment. During sprint planning meetings Scrum teams typically break down the stories, features, or requirements from the sprint backlog into individual tasks and work items. But because they are self-organizing, instead of assigning those tasks to team members at the beginning of the sprint, most Scrum teams rely on the individuals to assign the tasks to themselves during the Daily Scrum.

    Note

    Assigning work at the last responsible moment doesn’t necessarily mean that tasks are only self-assigned during the Daily Scrum. If there’s a really important reason to assign a task to a team member during sprint planning, it wouldn’t be responsible to delay that assignment until the first Daily Scrum.

12. Answer: C

    The primary focus of an agile team is to deliver value early, and the way the team does that is by collaborating with the stakeholder and prioritizing the highest value work. However, in this question the agile practitioner is the stakeholder, not the team member—the agile team doing the work is at the vendor, and the agile practitioner will work with that team’s product owner. So in this case, the product owner on the vendor’s team must collaborate with the agile practitioner.

    Note

    When you see a question asking about working with a vendor, part of your job is to figure out if the practitioner is the stakeholder and the vendor’s team members are filling the product owner, scrum master, and team roles.

13. Answer: A

    One reason that agile teams are able to improve over time is that they pay attention not just to their individual projects, but to the entire system that they’re working within. One way that they do that is by disseminating knowledge and practices—not just across their own organization, but across organizational boundaries.

14. Answer: B

    Agile practitioners must always advocate for agile principles, and one of the core principles of agile is that agile teams value responding to change over following a plan. Explaining the value to the scrum master is a good idea, but the best way to advocate for agile principles is by modeling those principles.

    Note

    You should always favor showing examples of agile principles from successful projects over simply explaining them.

15. Answer: D

    Every individual person on an agile team is encouraged to show leadership. To do this, agile teams foster an environment where it’s safe to make mistakes, and where everyone is treated with respect. However, the company does not typically set ground rules for the team.

    Note

    However, following the company’s rules for project management isn’t usually a particularly effective way to bring a team together.

    

16. Answer: D

    Kanban teams typically use cumulative flow diagrams to visualize the flow of work through the process. This allows them to get a visual sense of the average arrival rate (how frequently work items are added), lead time (the amount of time between when a work item is requested and when it’s delivered), and work in progress (the number of work items in the process at any time).

17. Answer: D

    Security and performance requirements (like the use of encryption or how quickly the software runs) are good examples of non-functional requirements. Agile teams elicit non-functional requirements that are relevant to their project by considering the environment that the code will run in, and they work with stakeholders to understand and prioritize those requirements.

    Note

    When you’re presented with several potential technical approaches, a spike solution is a good way to determine which one will work. However, in this case the team already knows that both solutions are feasible and what the results of each approach will be, so they wouldn’t actually learn anything from a spike solution.

18. Answer: C

    Agile teams conduct frequent retrospectives so that they can improve the way they do their work. On a Scrum team, everyone—including the scrum master, who participates as a peer, just like the other team members—participates in the retrospective by identifying improvements and working on a plan to implement those improvements. The scrum master also has an additional job, to help teach the rest of the team the rules of Scrum, including how to fill their roles in the meeting and maintain the meeting timebox.

19. Answer: B

    The scrum master is a servant leader whose job it is to help ensure that everyone has a common knowledge of the practices used by the team. When a servant leader is approached by a team member with a question or misunderstanding about a practice, he or she helps that person understand how the practice works and why it helps the team achieve the project’s goals.

20. Answer: C

    When an agile team works with a vendor, that vendor will typically use a methodology that is different from the one used by the agile team. In this case, the vendor is using a waterfall methodology—and that’s OK. What’s important here is that agile teams establish a shared vision of each project increment. In this question, the roles are flipped around, so you are the stakeholder, but aligning your expectations with the team doing the work and building trust with that team is still critically important to the project’s success. So if the vendor uses scope and objectives documents to do that, then your job is to make sure that your team’s view of the high-level vision and supporting objectives matches the view of the vendor team, and take action to fix any disagreements.

    Note

    Agile teams might value working software over comprehensive documentation, but they still value documentation. Don’t assume that an answer is wrong just because it involves working with documentation.

21. Answer: D

    People and teams always have their own professional and personal goals on every project. One reason that agile teams are so effective is because they take this into account by making sure that the team goals and the project goals are aligned. Scrum teams, for example, write down a simply stated, straightforward goal for every sprint. When the team has their own specific goal, they should collaborate to find common ground so that they accomplish the sprint goal while still making progress towards their team goal.

    Note

    There are often disagreements between team members—in this case, between the product owner and the rest of the team. Collaboration will almost always work better than negotiation in a situation like this.

22. Answer: D

    When teams run into serious problems, one of the first things that they should do is make sure that everyone—especially the stakeholders—understands the impact of the problem. And when that problem is going to cause serious delays, they need to reset everyone’s expectations in order to make sure they still deliver as much value as possible.

23. Answer: D

    When an agile team—and especially a Scrum team—completes a timeboxed iteration, the next step is to get feedback on the work that they completed by holding a demonstration for the stakeholders. However, agile teams only demonstrate work that is fully completed. If the work has not been completed, the team will usually include it as the first thing to be done when planning the next iteration.

24. Answer: A

    When your team’s stakeholders’ expectations are in line with the working software that your team delivers, it builds trust. That trust grows over time as each stakeholder sees that the working software increasingly incorporates his or her requirements, and that the team is able to adjust as those requirements change. The product owner plays a very important part in this on a Scrum team by making sure that each stakeholders’ expectations about what the team will deliver is always in line with the work they are doing.

    Note

    When the stakeholder and team agree on the definition of “done” for the increment, it prevents nasty surprises at the sprint review. A really effective way to do that is for the product owner and stakeholder to review the acceptance criteria for each story.

25. Answer: B

    Part of your job as an agile practitioner is to always keep an eye out for ways to support change at the organization level. One of your goals is educating and influencing people in the broader organization, and the best way to do this is to speak about your own team’s success.

    Note

    When you’re trying to influence others, it’s much more effective to talk about your own team’s success, rather than simply explaining how agile works or acting like a pushy agile zealot.

    Note

    This is an especially tough question. Did you choose the incorrect answer about engaging the product owner? Understanding why that answer is wrong requires you to be really familiar with what a product owner does—and doesn’t do—on a Scrum team. The product owner role is entirely focused on the project and the project’s specific stakeholders. This question asked about the company as a whole, not about the specific project. So this is really a question about the agile practitioner’s responsibility to support change at the organizational level by educating others in his or her company.

26. Answer: A

    Information radiators are an effective tool that agile teams use to create an informative workspace. An information radiator is a highly visual display (like a chart posted in a central location in the team space) that shows real progress and team performance.

27. Answer: C

    Agile teams are encouraged to do experimentation in order to surface problems and impediments to the team, and exploratory work (like spike solutions) is a really good way to do that. The results of that work should be surfaced to the team when they are problems or impediments that might slow the team down or impact the team’s ability to deliver value to the stakeholders.

    Note

    This is an especially tough question, because it requires you to understand a very specific task in one of the domains in the examination content outline, specifically task #1 in domain VI (Problem Detection and Resolution): “Create an open and safe environment by encouraging conversation and experimentation, in order to surface problems and impediments that are slowing the team down or preventing its ability to deliver value.” This question is worded in a way that references specific parts of that task (slow down progress, prevent its ability to deliver value). This problem domain accounts for 10% of the scored questions on the test, and there are only five tasks in that domain, so you may potentially see two scored questions based on this task.

28. Answer: B

    Agile teams select and tailor their process based not only on agile practices and values, but also on the characteristics of the organization. This team is having engineering problems, which is one hint that XP is the right solution for them. They might want to switch to Scrum, but assigning a team member to the product owner role is not an effective way to do that because the product owner will not have the authority to accept items on behalf of the team.

    Note

    Kaizen and continuous improvement are generally a good approach for improving a team, but that answer is not very specific. It is better to go with the answer that offers specific improvements that the team can make.

    Note

    This is an especially tough question. Did you choose the incorrect answer about assigning team members to the product owner and scrum master role? This sounds like a good idea! The problem is that it’s almost never a good idea to simply choose an existing team member to be the product owner, because product owners must have enough authority to adequately make decisions and accept features as done on behalf of the company, and it’s extremely unlikely that someone like that is already on the team. Instead of simply assigning a team member to the product owner role, teams must work with their users, stakeholders, and senior managers to find a product owner with that level of authority. Since that answer is incorrect, the next best answer is to adopt XP’s delivery-focused practices—especially quarterly and weekly cycles—because that is an effective way to solve the team’s problem.

29. Answer: B

    When a stakeholder needs a change to an item the team is currently working on, the product owner has the authority to immediately make that change. The most important thing is that the team is working on maximizing the value, so the item should be removed from the sprint backlog and the sprint should continue as usual: work on the other items continues, and the team holds a sprint review with the stakeholder when the timebox expires.

    Note

    Technically, the product owner has the authority to cancel a sprint, but it should be done in very rare occasions because it can seriously damage the trust that the team has built up with the stakeholders.

30. Answer: B

    Teams that have been using agile methodologies effectively for a long time tend to be really good at estimating, and there are many different ways to estimate. The important thing is that deciding on estimates, like any other decision made by an agile team, is most effective when it’s done collaboratively. Planning poker and wideband Delphi are methods for collaborative estimation that allow several team members to work together to come up with an estimate. Having an informal discussion is also a good way to collaborate. But simply leaving it in the hands of the product owner isn’t collaborative at all. And simply taking the maximum estimate generated by a team member is a great way to pad your schedule, but it is definitely not open or transparent, which goes against the Scrum value of openness.

31. Answer: C

    When your company has a requirement for all teams, you need to comply with it. That’s why agile teams tailor their process based on how the wider organization functions. But they still make sure that they are focused first and foremost on delivering value to the customer.

    Note

    Also, agile teams do value comprehensive documentation. They just value working software more.

32. Answer: A

    An agile practitioner should practice visualization of important project information by maintaining information radiators that are highly visible. It’s important that they show the team’s real progress, and a burn-down chart is a great way to do that.

33. Answer: B

    Teams often experience temporary drops in velocity, especially when multiple team members are on vacation. If those vacations have been planned for a long time, then that information should have been taken into account already in the release plan, so it should not change.

34. Answer: C

    This question is describing a Scrum team’s sprint planning meeting. During that meeting, the team first reviews the product backlog, which involves reviewing the overall list of features that will be delivered. The next thing the team should do is create the sprint backlog, which involves extracting items from the product backlog to deliver in the increment for the sprint.

35. Answer: C

    The complexity of deliverables plays a major role in how much work it will require to build. When the team member discovers that a deliverable was less complex than anticipated, the team should use that information to adapt the way they plan their project. Since the deliverable will require less work than expected, it means they’ll make more progress during each iteration toward completing the deliverable, and they can plan to release the deliverable earlier. But their velocity shouldn’t increase in the next iteration, because the team should take the reduced complexity into account when calculating the velocity for that iteration.

    Note

    The velocity of the iteration that the team just completed probably increased temporarily because the team member got more work done than she anticipated due to the unexpectedly low complexity of the deliverable. But now that they know it’s less complex, they’ll adjust their plan, and the velocity should return to normal.

36. Answer: B

    Kanban is a method for process improvement, not project management. So while kanban boards, cumulative flow diagrams, and value stream maps are valuable tools for visualizing and understanding the workflow for your process, they aren’t tools for tracking project progress. A task board, on the other hand, is a great tool for tracking project progress.

37. Answer: A

    Agile teams enhance their creativity by experimenting with new techniques whenever they can. This helps them discover ways of working that can improve efficiency and effectiveness. The only way to determine whether or not this new technique is an improvement is to try it out.

38. Answer: C

    In this question, a Scrum team just finished inspecting the project plan, and Scrum teams always do that during their daily scrum meeting. When issues are raised at the daily scrum, team members with knowledge of the issue schedule a follow-up meeting so that they can figure out how to adapt to the change, which almost always involves modifying the sprint backlog.

    Note

    It’s important for the product owner to keep the stakeholders up to date. However, the team hasn’t even determined whether this is a real issue, so it’s premature to alert stakeholders.

    

39. Answer: C

    When teams have identified threats and issues, they should maintain a prioritized list that they keep visible and constantly monitor. The reason for this is to encourage the team to take action on the issues (rather than ignore them), and to make sure that each issue has an owner and that the team keeps track of the status of each issue.

40. Answer: B

    Getting frequent feedback from users and customers is an effective way to confirm that you’re delivering business value and enhancing that value. You get that feedback at the sprint review, which is the meeting where you review the increment.

    Note

    The first sentence is a red herring. That’s true of every project!

41. Answer: C

    Sometimes teams run into issues that simply cannot be resolved. When this happens, the most important thing is to make sure everyone—especially the stakeholders—understands as soon as possible exactly how this will impact the commitments.

42. Answer: A

    When velocity drops, it’s often temporary. For example, the amount of work the team produces in an iteration might decrease temporarily if a team member is on vacation or if a specific work item turns out to be more difficult or complex than anticipated. But if the velocity drops significantly and stays at that lower level for several iterations, the team needs to adjust their release plan to reflect the fact that they won’t get deliverables done as quickly. That way they can maintain commitments to their stakeholders that are realistic, and not overly optimistic because they’re based on outdated information.

    Note

    Agile teams typically schedule releases that align with the end of their iterations, releasing work that’s been completed during the iteration. Often, a lower velocity won’t require the team to change the frequency of those releases. They’ll just deploy fewer deliverables at each release. That way the steady flow of completed deliverables will continue (even if the project takes longer).

43. Answer: A

    An important part of stakeholder engagement on an agile team is to help the stakeholders to establish their own relationships so that they can more effectively collaborate. Meeting with them to set up a working agreement for the sake of the project is an effective way to accomplish this.

    Note

    Servant leadership typically refers to the way someone in a leadership position—often the scrum master—relates to the rest of the team, recognizing that they’re the ones actually getting the work done.

44. Answer: B

    When teams encounter risks, issues, and threats to the project, an important priority should always be to communicate the status of those issues. An information radiator is a very good tool for doing that.

45. Answer: A

    A story map gives your team a way to collaborate with each other and create a visual release plan by organizing stories into releases. This helps your team provide forecasts for future releases to your stakeholders. And it does it at a level of detail that gives them enough information to plan effectively, without including specific details that the team can’t possibly know or honestly commit to this early on.

46. Answer: A

    Agile teams—and especially Scrum teams—work so well because they maintain a very high level of stakeholder involvement. One way that product owners do that is by constantly looking for changes in the project and the organization, and immediately acting on those changes to see if that change affects the project’s stakeholders. In this case, an organizational change created a new project stakeholder, so the product owner needs to engage with that person as soon as possible.

    Note

    This question starts off by describing the product owner role: “an agile practitioner who maintains a prioritized list of requirements for the team”—in other words, the person who maintains the product backlog.

47. Answer: C

    Teams refine the requirements for the software that they build by gaining consensus on the acceptance criteria for each feature or work item, and these acceptance criteria combine to form the definition of “done” for the product increment.

    Note

    A lot of people will have endless arguments disagreeing on how the terms “definition of ‘done’” and “acceptance criteria” differ slightly in meaning. Some people believe that definition of “done” applies only to the increment, while acceptance criteria apply only to individual stories or features. But for the exam, you may see the terms used interchangeably, and you will probably not be asked a question that requires you to differentiate between them.

48. Answer: B

    It’s part of an agile practitioner’s job to support change at the organization level, to educate people in the organization, and to influence behaviors and people in order to make the organization more effective and efficient.

49. Answer: A

    When one person assigns work to the team and expects them to report status, that’s the opposite of self-organizing, and the Scrum implementation is broken. On a self-organizing team, individual team members are empowered to make decisions together about what tasks they work on next. The daily scrum is where the whole team reviews these decisions.

    Note

    In an effective daily scrum, the agile practitioner would tell the rest of the team what task she plans to work on next. If this doesn’t seem like an effective approach, another team member will raise that as an issue, and they’ll meet together after the daily scrum to work out the details.

50. Answer: C

    Determining the root cause of a quality problem is an important first step to fixing a problem, and an Ishikawa (or fishbone) diagram is an effective tool for doing root cause analysis.

51. Answer: D

    After teams have been together for a while, they often enter a phase—referred to as “norming”—in which they start to resolve their differences and personality clashes, and a cooperative quality starts to emerge among the team members. According to adaptive leadership, a management and leadership approach that involves changing the way that leaders work with teams as they move through their stages of formation, the “norming” stage requires supporting, or leadership that features a lot of support but allows the team more freedom to determine their own direction.

    Note

    This question is about adaptive leadership, which is based on Tuckman’s theory of group development and Hershey’s situational leadership model, which were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s more important to understand the ideas of what happens to teams when they form and how effective leaders should adapt to them than to remember the names of these management theories.

52. Answer: D

    The “caves and commons” office layout, in which developers or pairs have semi-private spaces adjacent to a shared meeting space, is effective because it limits interruption while still allowing for osmotic communication (where team members learn important project information from overheard conversations). Open plans—especially ones where team members sit facing each other—can be very distracting, which makes it difficult to focus. And while closed-door offices do a great job of limiting interruptions (and team members definitely prefer them because they provide both privacy and status), they don’t allow for osmotic communication.

53. Answer: D

    The product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the deliverables. The main way that he or she does this is by prioritizing the units of work in the product backlog so that the team delivers the most valuable ones first, and he or she determines that value by collaborating with stakeholders. The team does not determine the value of the work items by themselves—this is only done by the product owner in collaboration with the stakeholders.

    Note

    You might see terms like “business representative” or “proxy customer”—they’re referring to the Product Owner.

54. Answer: C

    No stakeholder likes to be told that a feature he or she is expecting to be done at the end of the current iteration will be delayed until the next one or later. That’s why agile teams work especially hard to establish a clear picture of exactly what they will deliver at the end of the iteration—and they work really hard to maintain that shared understanding between the team and the stakeholders. So when the definition of “done” for the increment changes (in other words, when the team discovers a change in what they’re planning to deliver at the end of the iteration), they need to let the stakeholders know immediately.

55. Answer: B

    Constructive disagreement—and even the occasional argument—is normal and even valuable for teams. That’s why agile teams always strive to create an open and safe environment by encouraging conversation, disagreement, and even constructive arguments. The presence of a senior manager should not change this.

56. Answer: C

    Feedback and corrections to planned work and work in progress is done using periodic checkpoints with stakeholders. Most agile teams accomplish this by holding a review at the end of each iteration.

57. Answer: C

    Making the increment size smaller is an effective way to identify risks and respond to them as early as possible in the project. Including fewer stories in each iteration is a good way to limit the increment size.

58. Answer: D

    There is an upper limit on the number of people who can be on a Scrum team—it typically can support a maximum of nine people (but some teams make it work with up to twelve). Fourteen is definitely too large for a Scrum team, and an early sign that the team is too large is that people have trouble concentrating during the daily scrum. The best thing for this team to do is to split into two smaller teams.

59. Answer: A

    Agile teams always prefer face-to-face communications whenever possible, and digital videoconferencing tools are a great way to facilitate face-to-face communications. The team should always accommodate stakeholders whenever possible, but should not expect stakeholders to necessarily accommodate them (so requiring a stakeholder to fly out and co-locate with the team for several weeks is an unreasonable thing for a team to ask).

60. Answer: B

    The value stream map displayed in the chart shows time that the team spent working on the top, and time that the team wasted waiting on the bottom. If you add up the days, the team spent a total of 38 days actively working on the project, and 35 days waiting for approvals, stakeholders, and SA and DBA activities. That is a very large portion of the project spent waiting, which means there are plenty of opportunities to eliminate waste.

61. Answer: B

    Velocity is a very effective way to use the team’s actual performance from past sprints to understand their actual capacity for doing work, and using that information to forecast how much work they can accomplish in future iterations. Teams do this by assigning a relative size—typically using made-up units like story points—to each story, feature, requirement, or other item being worked on, and using the number of points per iteration to calculate the team’s capacity.

62. Answer: B

    It’s normal and healthy for team members to have constructive disagreements. It happens all the time on effective teams, especially when the team members feel personally committed to the project. While leaders sometimes need to step in and prevent arguments from getting out of hand, letting the team members resolve their own disagreements is always better for the team, because it creates cohesion and lets them reach common ground together.

63. Answer: A

    When you’re working on a Scrum team, it’s the product owner’s job to meet with the stakeholders, help them understand problems, and communicate the solutions to the team. Team members should never go directly to stakeholders with problems; they need to make sure the product owner is always involved.

    Note

    The part of the question about the product owner’s schedule conflict is a red herring. There’s only one answer to this question that doesn’t have the team member exclude the product owner.

64. Answer: D

    Agile teams are concerned not just with delivering high-value features, but with maximizing the total value that’s delivered to the stakeholders. That’s why they balance delivery of high-value work items with reducing risk. An important way agile teams do that is to increase the priority of high-risk work items in the backlog. This particular work item presents a high risk because it’s a low-priority work item, but if there’s a problem it will have a large impact.

65. Answer: C

    A generalizing specialist, or someone who has expertise in a specific area but is also improving in several other areas of expertise, is very valuable to an agile team. Generalizing specialists can help reduce team size by filling several different roles. Bottlenecks are less likely to occur, because one source of project bottlenecks comes from having only one team member able to do a certain task but not being available to perform it. Generalizing specialists help to create high-performing, cross-functional teams. However, they don’t necessarily have better planning skills than any other team member.

66. Answer: C

    Agile teams recognize that they learn a lot about the work that they will do along the way, so they expect their plans to improve as the project progresses. They do this by adapting their plan at the start of each iteration, and meeting every day to find and address any issues with that plan. This is how they refine their estimates of the scope and the schedule so that their plans always reflect a current understanding of what’s going on in the real world.

67. Answer: C

    Agile teams handle maintenance and operations work exactly the same way that they handle any other work. If bug fixes are critical, the team will work on them at the next opportunity. And the next opportunity, in most cases, is the start of the next iteration.

    Note

    Stopping work immediately to change directions introduces chaos, and is not an effective way to change priorities. Agile teams use iterations so that they can respond to change quickly without letting their projects spin out of control.

68. Answer: B

    One reason that agile teams are easy to work with is that they provide their stakeholders with forecasts and schedules that are at a level of detail that gives the stakeholders the information that they need without an unrealistically high level of detail. The scrum master should understand this, and recognize that there’s absolutely no way that the team could possibly know how each person will spend each hour for the next six months.

    Note

    When you give stakeholders a schedule that has an unrealistically high level of detail, you’re basically lying to them. That’s definitely not something agile teams do!

69. Answer: D

    Scrum teams value focus because even a small number of interruptions every week can cause significant delays, and the frustration from interruptions can seriously demotivate the team. As a servant leader, the scrum master needs to pay attention to anything that demotivates the team in order to keep morale high and the team productive. So while a servant leader typically doesn’t have the authority to grant permission to skip meetings called by the manager, it’s absolutely within the scrum master’s role to approach that manager and find ways to keep the interruptions to a minimum.

70. Answer: C

    Dealing with a non-cooperative team member is always difficult. On an agile team it’s especially hard because agile, more than most other ways of working, relies on a shared mindset among the team. That’s why it’s so important for team members to cooperate with each other. One way that they do that is to come up with ground rules that help improve the team’s coherence and strengthen each other’s shared commitment to the project’s goals and to the team.

    Note

    One way that a lot of Scrum teams handle a situation like this is to create a rule where anyone who arrives late to the daily scrum twice in a row has to wear a silly hat for the rest of the day or put a small amount of money into a “tip jar” that pays for a pizza or a round of drinks when it gets full.

71. Answer: B

    The first step in planning an agile project is defining deliverables. In other words, the team needs to know what they’re building. Agile teams typically use incremental methodologies, so the deliverables are defined by identifying specific units that the team will build incrementally.

72. Answer: D

    Managing the expectations of stakeholders is an important part of how agile teams work. One way that they do it is to make broad commitments at the beginning of the project, typically by coming up with general goals for the project deliverables. As the project unfolds and project uncertainty reduces, they can make more and more specific commitments. This helps give their stakeholders a good idea of exactly what will be delivered, without the team overcommitting or agreeing to deliver something that turns out to be impossible or unrealistic within the project’s time and cost constraints.

73. Answer: C

    Agile teams always provide as much transparency as they can to their primary stakeholders, especially when it comes to problems that could impact the project. Keeping the primary stakeholder informed is more important than updating information radiators, refining the backlog, or holding a retrospective.

    Note

    Any time a stakeholder is impacted, he or she needs to be kept informed. This is especially true on Scrum teams, where openness is highly valued.

    

74. Answer: C

    When you experiment with new techniques and process ideas, it helps you and your team discover more efficient and effective ways to get your project done, and this is an important way that agile teams enhance creativity. So when you are presented with a set of alternative techniques to use, you should consider them. On a Scrum team, the appropriate time for doing this is during the sprint planning meeting.

    Note

    The rules of Scrum are important and give you a highly effective way to manage projects and build software, but if they specifically conflict with company-wide rules, you’ll need to find a way to work within your company’s guidelines.

75. Answer: B

    It’s really important to encourage all of the team members to share knowledge. Agile teams collaborate and work together, because sharing knowledge is an important way that agile teams avoid risks and improve productivity.

    Note

    It’s true that the sprint retrospective typically comes after the sprint review. However, there’s a more pressing issue that you have to handle first.

76. Answer: D

    When a Scrum team plans the next sprint, one thing that they do is craft a sprint goal. This is their objective for the sprint that they’ll meet by completing the work in the sprint backlog and delivering the increment. The sprint goal is how they stablish a shared, high-level vision of what they will accomplish for their stakeholders by delivering the increment.

    Note

    Information radiators are a good way to communicate information about how the project is going, but they don’t really do a lot to establish a shared vision for the sprint.

77. Answer: A

    Value stream analysis is a very valuable tool for detecting waste, especially waste that is caused by waiting for other teams.

    Note

    An Ishikawa (or fishbone) diagram can help you describe the root cause of project problems, but it isn’t tailored to finding specific causes of waste due to waiting time.

78. Answer: A

    All of these answers are good ideas. But the question specifically asked about the most effective strategy for prioritizing stories in the sprint backlog. Agile teams need to deliver stakeholder value early, which is why they plan their releases around minimally marketable features or minimally viable products. An early product release that has just enough features is the definition of a minimally viable product. The other answers are good strategies to get there.

    Note

    If you see a question where several answers look like they could be correct, choose the answer that’s most specific to the question being asked.

79. Answer: A

    Scrum teams plan their work by dividing the project into increments, and delivering a “done” increment at the end of each sprint. Scrum teams typically don’t make major adjustments to their long-term plans mid-sprint. Instead, they make sure they are working on the most valuable deliverables they can during any individual sprint, so that even if priorities changes, they can meet the commitments they made for the current sprint and still deliver value. They’ll adapt their plans to the new priorities as soon as the current sprint is done.

    Note

    Completing the current sprint isn’t the same thing as stubbornly sticking to an outdated plan. But if the alternative is cancelling the sprint, it’s much better to complete the current sprint and deliver the backlog items that the team promised the stakeholders at the last sprint review.

80. Answer: A

    When teams discover risks or other issues that could threaten the project, they need to communicate the status of those issues to the stakeholders, and if possible, incorporate activities into the backlog to deal with the risk. One useful activity is exploratory work, where team members take time during a sprint to build a risk-basked spike solution to help mitigate the risk. But while refactoring the source code and performing continuous integration might be useful for lowering risk due to technical debt, it is unlikely to help with this situation.

    Note

    When you see a “which-is-NOT” question, be really careful to read all of the answers, and make sure you pick the WORST answer, not the BEST.

81. Answer: C

    When the team doesn’t have a consensus on what it means for a work item to be done, it can lead to problems, arguments, and delays late in the iteration. This is why the team needs to determine a definition of “done” that can be used as acceptance criteria. This is usually done on a “just-in-time” basis by leaving the decision for the last responsible moment—but for the team in this question, they waited too long to make that decision.

82. Answer: B

    The team was notified of an operations problem, and they need to modify their plan to take it into account. They have an estimate for the impact: two team members will need to spend three iterations on the workaround. So they’ll treat this change the way they treat any other change, by adding stories to their weekly cycles, and adjusting their release plan to reflect the change. Since this workaround is just more project work, it won’t reduce the velocity, because work on the stories for the workaround will count towards the velocity just like any other work.

    Note

    There’s no need to run a risk-based spike, because there is no uncertainty. The team knows that the server upgrade will be delayed, and that they’ll have to spend time and effort on the workaround.

83. Answer: A

    When a serious risk happens early on in the project, that’s when iteration is most important. In this case, the team discovered a problem that needs to be fixed as soon as possible, so work needs to start right away—that means the product owner should add an item to the sprint backlog to start that work immediately. But the work will continue into the next sprint, so he or she also adds another item to the product backlog to make sure the fix is completed.

84. Answer: B

    Agile teams plan their projects at multiple levels. For example, Scrum teams use the product backlog to do long-term strategic planning, hold sprint planning meetings at the beginning of each sprint to build the sprint backlog, and review their plan every day at the daily scrum. In this case, the stakeholder wants to know about the sprint backlog, which is created at the sprint planning meetings.

    Note

    This question doesn’t use the term “sprint backlog” but instead describes it (“a list of features, stories, and other items to be delivered during the sprint”).

85. Answer: B

    Agile teams should always think about risks and potential issues that could threaten the project. When they encounter them, the team should maintain them in a way that ensures that the status and priority of each risk is visible and monitored.

    Note

    It’s a great idea to add items to the backlog in order to deal with risks. However, the team should not necessarily do it for every single risk that was raised in the retrospective. Sometimes risks can be accepted, and sometimes it’s enough just to be aware of them.

86. Answer: B

    Teams often size the items that they will work on using ideal time. This means working together to figure out how much time it would take for a team member to work on each item in an “ideal” situation: he or she has everything needed to complete the work, there are no interruptions, and no other external factors or issues that could get in the way of completing the work. Unlike relative size techniques (like assigning story points to each item), ideal time is the team’s best estimate of the absolute time required.

87. Answer: B

    People on teams have conflicts all the time. The difference on an agile team is that they genuinely try to collaborate with each other. In this case, the XP team practice incremental design by finding a minimal first step that leaves the design open to either person’s approach. Having the two team members use pair programming to build that approach together is a highly collaborative way to handle the situation. (Also, setting team ground rules to prohibit arguments is a terrible idea. Some arguments are healthy, and can lead to a better product and a more cohesive team.)

    Note

    Fist-of-five voting is a way for teams of people to express their opinions. But in this case the team is arguing over which technical approach is superior, and swaying opinions is not necessarily the best way to reach the best technical solution.

88. Answer: B

    A really important part of an agile team is that everyone is allowed to experiment and make mistakes. When you make a mistake, you need to be open and public about it with your team. It’s tempting to try to cover up the problem, but when problems happen you can’t shield the rest of the team from the consequences. You need to be open about what happened, and work through the problem together.

    Note

    When you’re open about your own mistakes, it helps build a safe and trustful team environment.

89. Answer: D

    When new leaders emerge on an agile team, your job is to encourage that leadership. It’s often difficult to try out new techniques, so your job as an agile practitioner is to establish a safe and respectful environment for that.

90. Answer: D

    Agile teams are highly innovative because they create a safe environment where they’re allowed to make mistakes so they can improve. An important part of the mindset of allowing mistakes is to think of them as problems that need to be corrected, rather than learning experiences. And it’s important to be open about mistakes that you’ve made, and encourage others to do the same.

    Note

    If you “allow” a mistake to go “uncorrected” you’re still viewing it as a mistake that you were generous enough to let slip by. Part of developing an effective agile mindset is learning to see mistakes as genuine opportunities for improvement.

91. Answer: C

    A value stream map is the result of value stream analysis. Typically, a value stream map shows the flow of an actual work item (such as a product feature) through a process, with each step categorized as either working or waiting (non-working) time. One goal of value stream analysis is identification of waste in the form of non-working time that can be eliminated.

92. Answer: C

    Interruptions can be extraordinarily damaging to the team’s productivity. Even a brief interruption can take a team member—especially a developer writing code—out of his or her state of “flow,” and it can take up to 45 minutes to get back into it. So four or five phone calls a day might not sound too bad, but that level of interruption can cause someone to sit at their desk all day and get literally no work done. It’s unrealistic to change the office layout (and that won’t fix the phone call problem, anyway). And while it makes sense to adjust the sprint backlog, that doesn’t fix the problem. So the best option is to establish a daily “no-call” window to limit interruptions.

    Note

    Having the product owner approach the stakeholders makes sense, but if the stakeholders need to talk to team members, it’s unreasonable to ask them to go through an intermediary. Agile teams value face-to-face (or phone) conversations, and those conversations can be very important to the project.

    

93. Answer: B

    Teams work best when they have a safe and trustful environment where people are allowed to experiment and make mistakes. As a servant leader, the scrum master must do everything that he or she can to establish that environment, even when it means having uncomfortable conversations with senior managers.

    Note

    This is going to be a difficult discussion for the scrum master, and it’s a good example of how it’s not always easy for Scrum teams to value courage.

94. Answer: C

    A persona is a profile of a made-up user that includes personal facts and often a photo. It’s a tool that a lot of Scrum teams use to help them understand who their users and stakeholders are and what they need. Agile teams need to identify all of their stakeholders—including future ones they don’t necessarily know about today. Personas are a great tool for doing that.

95. Answer: C

    Agile teams don’t work in a vacuum—they constantly look at all of the infrastructure, operational, and environmental factors that could affect their project, even when those factors happen outside of the team. When they run across the problem, it’s handled like any other problem: the product owner prioritizes it in the backlog based on its value. In this case, this is a severe problem, so the work item that the product owner adds to the backlog must be given high priority so that the team resolves it quickly.

96. Answer: C

    Agile team members work hard to identify their project’s business stakeholders and make sure that everyone on the team has a good understanding about what they need and expect from the project. But requiring stakeholders to attend planning meetings and requiring a sign-off on the plan does the opposite—it will make them feel less engaged, and create bureaucratic hurdles that prevent the team from responding to change.

    Note

    Read every question carefully, and especially watch out for “which-is-not” questions.

97. Answer: B

    This is a burn down chart for a team whose current sprint is running into trouble. They’re two-thirds of the way through the current 30-day iteration, and the velocity has slowed down significantly. If they don’t remove stories from their sprint backlog, it’s unlikely that they will meet their sprint goal.

    Note

    You can’t determine that the team did a poor job planning just because the velocity is slower than expected. There are plenty of problems that teams can’t anticipate—for example, a team member could have gotten sick. This is why Scrum teams constantly inspect and adapt, and why agile teams value responding to change over following a plan.

98. Answer: B

    Your job as an agile practitioner includes helping to ensure that everyone on your team shares a common understanding of the agile practices that you are using. Common knowledge of agile practices is a basic part of working together effectively. So in this situation, you need to sit down with each team member and make sure they understand the practices that you use to respond to change.

99. Answer: A

    Product owners must prioritize any relevant non-functional requirements exactly like they do with all other requirements, and this includes operational requirements that might come from a DevOps group. In this case, the script needs to be modified in order to hold the sprint review, so the change has to be included in the current sprint—and since that will cause some work to be delayed past the end of the sprint, that work must be moved back to the sprint backlog.

    Note

    Any time work will extend past the end of a sprint, it needs to be moved back to the sprint backlog and planned for a future sprint. It’s never an option to break the timebox and extend the length of the sprint to include additional work.

100. Answer: D

     Agile teams are self-organizing and empowered to make decisions about how to meet their iteration goals. This means that they work together to determine what tasks they need to perform in order to meet the sprint goals, and they’ll often prioritize the stories with the most risk early in the iteration. The scrum master can help them self-organize and understand the methodology that they use, but he or she does not decide the order of the work, because that’s not part of servant leadership.

101. Answer: C

     Osmotic communication happens when team members absorb important project information from the discussions that take place around them. The XP primary practice of sitting together in a shared team space is an effective way to encourage osmotic communication.

102. Answer: A

     Agile teams organize their requirements into minimally marketable features that they can deliver incrementally. By planning releases that deliver the most valuable features first, they can deliver value to the stakeholders as early as possible.

     Note

     You might also see the exam mention “minimally viable products,” which are very closely related to minimally marketable features.

103. Answer: C

     This team is concerned about a potential problem, but currently there has not been any actual impact on their project—and there won’t be an impact if the problem turns out not to exist. This is a good opportunity to perform exploratory work (which some people refer to as spike solutions). That’s a useful way for teams to determine if a technical problem can be resolved, or if they need to find a different approach.

104. Answer: C

     One of the most important jobs that a product owner has on a Scrum team is making sure that new stakeholders are appropriately engaged in the project. Ideally, all stakeholders will attend every sprint review. However, there’s no rule that says that every stakeholder must attend all sprint review meetings. Some stakeholders don’t have time to attend them, or are in another time zone that makes it difficult for them to attend, or simply don’t want to. It’s the product owner’s job to do whatever it takes to make sure those stakeholders are involved, using whatever manner works best for them.

105. Answer: C

     Agile teams—and especially the product owners on those teams—must identify all of the stakeholders and engage them throughout the whole project. In this case, you are meeting with stakeholders partway through an iteration, which means you are in the product owner role, so when you hear that there is a stakeholder who might impact the requirements for the project, you have identified a new stakeholder, so the next thing you should do is engage with that person.

106. Answer: B

     This burn down chart shows a 30-day sprint that’s going exactly as the team expects it to. They’ve probably been working together for a long time, because the velocity is constant. You can tell that because the burn down line is always very close to the guideline. There might be a few days where it’s just above or below the line, but when you’re looking at a burn down chart you care more about the trend than about individual days.

107. Answer: C

     People work most effectively when they’re in an open and safe environment where they’re encouraged to talk about anything related to the project—especially issues that could potentially cause problems.

108. Answer: D

     Once the team has finished planning an iteration, it’s important that they make the results public to all of the project stakeholders. That’s a really effective way to build trust between the team and the business because it shows that the team has committed to specific goals for the iteration. It also helps reduce uncertainty by making it clear exactly what the team intends to accomplish.

109. Answer: A

     When people on an agile team discover issues that could affect the project, they make sure that their team members know—and more importantly, work with them to find ways to fix the problem. In fact, they’ll do two things: they’ll fix the problem today, and they’ll make sure the process or methodology they follow addresses the issue so it doesn’t happen again in the future.

110. Answer: B

     Agile teams members should always be encouraged to collaborate with each other and share their knowledge. Pair programming is a highly effective practice for both collaboration and knowledge sharing.

111. Answer: B

     Agile teams value working software over comprehensive documentation, and the best way to help stakeholders understand this is to show that past projects have gone well when they followed this value. However, it’s always better to show success than to simply insist on a certain way of working.

     Note

     Agile teams value working software over comprehensive documentation. But that doesn’t mean they never use comprehensive documentation! They just value working software more.

112. Answer: B

     Agile teams working on a new project need a starting point that they can use going forward. A good first step is to create a release plan, or a high-level plan of when specific deliverables will be released. Creating this plan involves creating very broad estimates of the scope of the items being delivered and the work required to build them, and using that information to come up with a very rough schedule. This schedule will not have a lot of detail, because that reflects the team’s current high level understanding of the project.

     Note

     A story map is a great way to build a release plan for a team that uses stories. However, that plan should not be based on highly detailed effort estimates, especially at the beginning of the project.

113. Answer: C

     Agile teams are always working to improve their effectiveness by continuously tailoring and adapting their project process. One way that they do this is by periodically reviewing the practices that they use, the culture of the team and the organization, and their goals.

114. Answer: A

     One of the most effective ways for a team to build trust with a stakeholder is to establish a shared understanding of exactly what will be delivered during each sprint, and genuinely collaborate with him or her when trade-offs need to be made for technical or schedule reasons.

     Note

     Agile teams value collaborating with their stakeholders over setting up contract-like agreements with them.

115. Answer: A

     You are an agile practitioner meeting with stakeholders, which means that you are in the product owner role—and the product owner’s job is to collaborate with stakeholders to understand the value of each deliverable, and use that information to prioritize the items in the backlog. Product owners need to take two things into account when they prioritize the backlog: the relative value of each feature, and the amount of work required to build it. Since you are able to assign relative value to each item in the backlog but you don’t yet know how to prioritize them, the missing information is the amount of work required. The way to get that information is to re-estimate the items in the backlog.

     Note

     The question mentioned “the list of planned features”—this is the definition of the product backlog.

     Note

     This is an especially tough question. A lot of questions on the exam ask about a specific tool, technique, or practice—this one is about the product backlog. But a lot of questions won’t specifically mention it by name. Instead of calling it a product backlog, this question describes it (“list of planned features”). The key to questions like this is to break them down using terms that you know. “You have just assigned a relative value to each item in the list of planned features”—that means you just finished assigning a relative business value to the items in the product backlog. It also means that you must be the product owner, because that’s the only person on the team who meets with stakeholders and assigns a business value to backlog items. So if the product owner has assigned a relative business value to each item in the product backlog, what’s the next step for the team to take in order for the plan to work? Scrum teams plan their work based on business value and effort, so the next step for the team is to re-estimate the backlog.

116. Answer: D

     Co-location—or team members working in close proximity to each other in a shared team space—is a great way to encourage osmotic communication (or absorbing of important project information from overheard conversations). It makes it easier to create an informative workspace (for example, by posting information radiators), and team members benefit because they have access to their teammates. However, one downside of co-located teams is that there’s a lot more potential for distractions.

     Note

     There’s no “perfect” way to organize your team space, and there are trade-offs that come with every strategy. However, the benefits of co-located teams in a shared team space far outweigh the costs.

117. Answer: C

     Agile teams maximize and optimize the value of the deliverables that they build by collaborating with stakeholders. On a Scrum team, it’s the role of the product owner to collaborate with the stakeholder, understand the value, and help the team to deliver that value.

118. Answer: A

     This team is attempting to do root cause analysis on a problem that they ran into so that they can fix the underlying problem and prevent it from happening in the future. An Ishikawa (or fishbone) diagram is an effective tool for performing root cause analysis.

119. Answer: D

     Agile teams use frequent verification and validation to ensure product quality. This means doing product testing and conducting frequent reviews and inspections. These verification steps will help the team identify improvements, which must then be incorporated in the product.

120. Answer: A

     Agile teams value responding to change, even when those changes are bad news—like a budget cut that will require the team to scale back the scope of what they’ll deliver. And they value collaborating with their stakeholders, even when it means delivering that bad news. That’s why every agile methodology includes some sort of mechanism or rule that lets them inspect the plan that the team is currently following (like holding daily standup meetings and retrospectives), changing the plan any time it becomes unrealistic, and alerting their stakeholders to the change.

     Note

     Sometimes it may seem like working around a product owner is a good idea. It’s not—you always need the product owner in the loop on every change so that the stakeholders can be kept in the loop. That’s how agile teams make sure they deliver the most valuable products.