The PMI-ACP® certification is valuable...

The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® credential is one of the hottest and fastest-growing certifications out there, and it’s getting more and more valuable every day. But don’t take our word for it! Go to your favorite job search website and do a search for jobs with the keyword “agile”. You’ll find that many of them prefer or require an agile certification—and employers recognize that job candidates who are PMI-ACP® certified are a perfect fit.

The PMI-ACP® exam is based on the content outline

The Project Management Institute put a LOT of effort into designing and maintaining the PMI-ACP® exam, and they work very hard to make sure that the material is correct and current, and that the exam has an appropriate level of difficulty. The main way that they’ve accomplished this is by creating the PMI-ACP® Examination Content Outline. The content outline tells you everything that’s covered by the exam. Here’s what you’ll find in it:

• The exam is divided into seven domains that represent separate aspects of agile projects that questions will focus on

• Each domain contains a series of tasks that represent discrete actions that agile teams often take, or responses to specific situations that agile teams might find themselves in

  Note

  Questions on the exam are based on specific tasks in the content outline.

• The content outline contains a set of tools and techniques that might appear in exam questions

  Note

  Most of these tools and techniques should be familiar, because they were covered in the first six chapters.

  • → But it’s not an exhaustive list—there could be agile practices that appear on the exam but are not in that list! We’ve made sure to cover those practices in this book.

• It also includes a list of knowledge and skills that agile practitioners are expected to understand and apply to the situations that they encounter on the job

“You are an agile practitioner...”

The PMI-ACP® exam is all about understanding real-world situations that happen to agile teams. You’ll be asked about what someone on an agile team should do when specific things happen on a project. You’ll be tested on your knowledge of different project situations, and how agile teams respond to those situations. One approach that many questions on the exam take is to ask you about how an agile practitioner would respond to a specific situation. Handling questions like this is an important key to passing the exam. Here’s how to do that:

1. Understand what the question is asking

   A really good starting point is to understand what kind of question this is. Is it a “which-comes-next” question, where you’re being asked to figure out what happens next or how to handle a situation? Is it a “which-is-NOT” question, where you need to choose a response that isn’t appropriate? Make sure you take the time to read the whole question.

2. Determine what the team is doing

   Understanding what the team is currently doing is an important key to figuring out the answer to the question. Is the team holding a retrospective? Are they in the middle of a daily stand-up meeting? Are they refactoring their code, doing continuous integration, or writing unit tests? Are they planning the next iteration, or giving a demo of the work they completed to the stakeholders? The answer to the question depends on which of these things are going on.

3. Use clues in the question to figure out your role

   A lot of questions lay out a specific situation and ask how you would respond. But your response will vary depending on what your role is on the project. You could be in the role of scrum master, product owner, team member, stakeholder, senior manager, or something else. So when you see a question that asks about an agile practitioner, always look in that question for any clue about what the practitioner’s role is.

   Note

   Don’t be surprised if terms like “scrum master” or “product owner” appear in lowercase on the exam. We’ll sometimes use lowercase for these terms to get you used to seeing it.

4. Unless told otherwise, assume it’s a Scrum team

   The PMI-ACP® exam is not dependent on any specific agile methodology. Some questions might ask about a specific method or methodology, but often they won’t. When this happens, it’s really useful to assume you’re working on a Scrum team. The question might not be asking about Scrum specifically, but following the rules of Scrum will always help you figure out the correct answer.

If you’re asked about what an agile practitioner would do in a situation, use clues in the question to determine the practitioner’s role—and if the question doesn’t specify a specific method, it’s safe to assume that the team is using Scrum.

there are no Dumb Questions

Q: Why should the exam assume that you’re using Scrum? Isn’t that showing a specific bias toward Scrum?

A: Scrum is by far the most popular approach to agile—it’s used by the majority of agile teams, according to recent surveys—which is why we focused so heavily on it in this book. However, the exam doesn’t necessarily assume that you’re using Scrum. The exam is testing you on specific situations that any agile team might run into. But if you imagine that the team is using Scrum, it makes the question much easier to answer.

Q: Do I need to spend a lot of time memorizing all of the tools and techniques from this book?

A: Not necessarily—but a good familiarity with them is definitely a really helpful staring point. The first six chapters covered most of the tools and techniques that you might see on the exam. That’s why we recommend that you do all of the exercises and puzzles in the first six chapters before you start preparing for the exam.

But keep in mind that the PMI-ACP® exam is highly focused on situations. You will definitely see questions that involve tools, techniques, and practices, but they are almost always used as part of resolving a problem similar to one you would see on an agile team in real life.

Q: Did you just say that “most” of the tools and techniques in the content outline were covered in the first six chapters? Why not all of them?

A: There are a few things that appear in the “tools and techniques” section of the PMI-ACP® Examination Content Outline which are important and very useful, but not quite so common in the experience of a typical, day-to-day agile team—and in the first six chapters of this book, we concentrated on teaching real-world agile as much as possible. But don’t worry, we’ll definitely fill in the gaps and make sure that every tool and technique from the content outline that you haven’t seen yet is covered in this chapter, so there won’t be any surprises when you take the exam.

A long-term relationship for your brain

Take a minute and think back over everything you’ve learned throughout this book. Does it seem just a little bit…well, overwhelming? Don’t worry, that’s absolutely normal. You’ve got all of this information that’s floating around in your brain, and your brain is still trying to organize it.

Your brain is an amazing machine, and it’s really good at organizing information. Luckily, when you feed it so much new data, there are ways that you can help make it “stick.” That’s what you’re going to do in this chapter. Your brain wants its new information to be categorized, and we want to make sure everything you need to know for the exam sticks in your brain.

So for this study guide to be as effective as possible, we need you to work with us. We’re going to concentrate on one specific area of the exam material at a time. But unlike the rest of the book, these areas don’t necessarily line up with specific methodologies. Your job is to try to clear your mind of distractions, and concentrate only on the specific topic that we’re presenting.

Yes! Cognitive psychologists call it chunking, and it’s a really effective way of getting information into your long-term memory. When you have a collection of things that are strongly associated with one another, it gives your brain a sort of “guideline” for storing it. And the weaker associations with the other “chunks” give it a bigger framework for managing this large amount of information, so that it’s all mutually reinforcing.

Pool Puzzle

Your job is to take words and phrases from the pool and place them into the blank lines in the Agile Manifesto. You may not use the same word or phrase more than once, and you won’t need to use all the words or phrases. Don’t worry about the order of the values. See how much of this you can get without looking at the answer!

Pool Puzzle Solution

Your job is to take words and phrases from the pool and place them into the blank lines in the Agile Manifesto. You may not use the same word or phrase more than once, and you won’t need to use all the words or phrases. Don’t worry about the order of the values. See how much of this you can get without looking at the answer!

Exam Questions

1. Agile teams highly value all of the following except:

   1. Customer collaboration

   2. Working software

   3. Responding to change

   4. Precise up-front planning

2. Joanne is a developer on a team that builds games. She put a lot of time into building a key feature of their upcoming release. When end users tested it, she discovered that it needed some fundamental changes and bug fixes. The users were still happy to play the game and gave it mid-range reviews during the test, but she knows the changes they’ve suggested would make it better. The game is due to be released in two weeks, but Joanne thinks that she’ll be done with all of their requests in that time. What’s the BEST thing to do next?

   1. Refuse to make the changes and release the features the way they are today

   2. Prioritize the work and let the team self-organize to get as many of the highest priority features in the first release as possible. Then release patches with the fixes and changes after the product is live.

   3. Do a root cause analysis on why the requirements were missed

   4. Delay the release by a few months so all of the features can be finished first

3. Ajay is an agile practitioner for a co-located software team. In his Daily Scrum meeting, the team often asks to review the current burn down chart and cumulative flow diagram. What’s the BEST thing for him to do next?

   1. Create an information radiator where the team sits

   2. Ask the team to review the data prior to the meeting so it doesn’t waste everybody’s time every day

   3. Move the burn down and CFD review to the retrospective

   4. All of the above

4. Which is NOT a core focus of agile teams?

   1. Releasing early and often

   2. Simplicity

   3. Getting estimates right

   4. Self-organization

5. You are an agile practitioner on a Scrum team. Your team is being asked to create elaborate schedules and lists of milestones. Any schedule delay is treated as a cause for concern in weekly steering committee meetings mandated by your Portfolio Management group. What is the BEST thing for you to do?

   1. Make sure your team creates a plan and report any changes as requested

   2. Educate your upper management on agile principles and work with the Portfolio Management group on a different approach to status

   3. Refuse to cooperate with the Portfolio Management group

   4. Create a status report for the Portfolio Management group on your own and don’t bother the team with it

6. You are a Scrum Master on a five-person co-located software team. In the most recent retrospective, someone on your team suggested that the team might be overloaded with too much work in progress. What is the BEST thing for you to do?

   1. Tell the team to finish the work within the sprint

   2. Tell the customers to funnel all requests through you so the team doesn’t get overloaded

   3. Experiment with setting WIP limits

   4. All of the above

7. You are a Scrum Master on a five-person co-located software team. Your team has a sprint planning meeting planned for four days from now. What is the BEST thing for you to do?

   1. Nothing, because the team is self-organizing so they can plan without you

   2. Make sure that every item in the backlog has complete documentation so that estimation is easier

   3. Talk to the end users about when they need all of the items in the backlog, and tell the team when they need to commit to each of them

   4. Work with the product owner to refine the backlog so that it’s ready for the estimation session

8. Which of the following is NOT an agile principle?

   1. Satisfy the customer by releasing early and often

   2. Under-commit and over-deliver

   3. Focus on technical excellence

   4. Work at a sustainable pace

9. What is the best indicator of success on an agile project?

   1. Status reports that show no critical issues

   2. A well-developed plan

   3. Working software delivered to customers

   4. Happy teams

10. How do agile teams create the best architectures and designs?

    1. Prototyping

    2. Self-organizing

    3. Documenting

    4. Planning

Exam Answers

1. Answer: D

   While agile teams do value the act of planning, they focus on responding to changing conditions rather than sticking to up-front plans. That’s why the more precise the plan is at the beginning of the project, the less flexible it is in the face of change.

2. Answer: B

   If the users are happy to play the game in its current state, so delaying the release is a bad choice. The features can be added in future frequent releases. It wouldn’t make sense to refuse changes that the end users request or to spend time trying to figure out why the requirements were missed instead of making the changes.

3. Answer: A

   An agile practitioner should focus on creating information radiators so that teams have access to all of the data about their work and can make decisions about how to keep their work on track on their own.

4. Answer: C

   Agile teams focus on delivering software frequently, self-organizing, and simplicity in design and approach. Those are all principles that drive an agile mindset; getting estimates right is not.

5. Answer: B

   You can’t expect that everyone will understand agile immediately. If you’re working on a Scrum team in an organization that hasn’t fully embraced agile, the best thing you can do for your team and your company is to help to educate people around you and influence the processes you work with to align with the principles and mindset your team is using.

6. Answer: C

   It’s important for a Scrum Master to be open to experimenting with new practices to make the team’s work more efficient. Just telling the team to finish the work doesn’t seem like it would solve the problem and telling the customers to talk to you instead of the team would make it hard for the team to self-organize and collaborate with the customer.

7. Answer: D

   As a servant leader, you are not responsible for documenting all of the backlog items or committing the team to dates. The best thing you can do is help the product owner refine the backlog and get it ready for the team to estimate.

8. Answer: B

   Under-committing and over-delivering is not an agile principle. Agile teams try to commit to what they can deliver, giving their customers an accurate picture of their project, and satisfying their customers by delivering frequently.

9. Answer: C

   The best indicator of success on an agile team is working software delivered to customers.

10. Answer: B

    Teams do their best work when they’re able to self-organize. That’s how they create the best architectures, designs, and products.

Answers in “WHO DOES WHAT? Solution”

Answers in “Tools Solution”

Agile teams use customer value to prioritize requirements

The very first principle of the Agile Manifesto does a great job of describing the attitude that agile teams have towards their customers and stakeholders:

This is why agile teams—and especially teams using Scrum—pay so much attention to the product backlog, and how the items in it are ranked. That’s why the PMI-ACP® exam might cover customer-valued prioritization tools and techniques, including these:

MoSCoW method

This is a simple technique where requirements or backlog items are divided into “Must have,” “Should have,” “Could have,” and “Won’t have”—the first letter of each option form the word MoSCoW to make it easier to remember.

Relative prioritization/ranking

When teams use relative prioritization or ranking, they take work items or requirements, assign a numeric value to each one to represent customer value, and sort them using that value.

Kano analysis

The Kano model was developed in the 1980s by Noriaki Kano, a Japanese professor who studies quality and engineering management. His model of customer satisfaction can be used to track how innovations that previously delighted customers become basic needs over time that will disappoint them if not present in a product.

Value calculations help you figure out which projects to do

There are a few types of calculations that will appear on the PMI-ACP® exam as definitions. You won’t need to calculate these, but you should know what each term means. All of these numbers can help a team determine which projects have the most value. If you’re trying to decide between two projects, these can help you determine which one is the best.

Return on Investment (ROI)

This number is the money you expect to make from a project that you are building. Ranch Hand Games expect to sell a million units of CGW5 within the first month of release. Of course, the longer it takes to develop, the higher the cost to get that return.

Net present value (NPV)

This is the actual value at a given time of the project minus all of the costs associated with it. This includes the time it takes to build it and labor as well as materials. People calculate this number to see if it’s worth doing a project.

Earned Value Management (EVM) for Agile

If you studied for the PMP® exam, you learned about earned value calculations, which measure how well the project is performing by putting an actual cost in money or hours on value the product is delivering, and figuring out how much of that value has been delivered so far. Agile projects can use this too.

Internal rate of return (IRR)

This is the amount of money the project will return to the company that is funding it. It’s how much money a project is making the company. It’s usually expressed as a percentage of the funding that has been allocated to it.

We kept chapters coherent to get them into your brain.

Most of the tools, techniques, and practices that we cover in this chapter but nowhere else in the book are on the PMI-ACP® exam mainly because they’re traditional project management techniques—they’re relevant to the exam because they are also used by some agile teams, but they’re not really a core part of Scrum, XP, or Lean/Kanban. Including them would have been a distraction... and distractions reduce the coherence of a topic that you’re trying to learn, and that can keep information from getting into your brain as effectively. (This is actually an application of chunking, which we talked about in the beginning of this chapter!)

Exam Questions

1. For an agile team, the most important attribute of a product is...

   1. Technical excellence

   2. Quality

   3. Frequency of delivery

   4. The value it brings the customer

2. Which of the following BEST describes the goal of an agile product release?

   1. To release the smallest increment that provides value to a customer as soon as possible

   2. To release the largest increment that a team can produce in a time frame

   3. To include as many customer requests as possible

   4. To find the smallest market possible for a product

3. Which Scrum ceremony provides customer feedback on working software?

   1. Planning

   2. Backlog refinement

   3. Sprint retrospective

   4. Sprint review

4. Some agile teams use a practice called _________________ to collaboratively prioritize work based on value to a customer.

   1. Fist-of-Five voting

   2. Planning poker

   3. Backlog refinement

   4. Joint design sessions

5. You and your team are holding a backlog refinement meeting. In the course of the discussion, it occurs to a few of your teammates that one of the features in the backlog could have multiple technical approaches. Your team is concerned that if they don’t take the correct approach, it might result in serious performance problems. What’s the BEST thing for your team to do next?

   1. Research and document the right approach before starting work on it

   2. Move the risky feature to the end of the backlog so the team has more time to think about the solution

   3. Move the risky feature to the start of the backlog so the team focuses on it first

   4. Write down the risk in a risk register and report it to upper management

6. Paul is a developer on an agile software team. During a planning session, the Product Owner tells everyone that customers have asked for performance improvements in their upcoming release. Performance problems have caused a few cancellations recently and the situation is quickly becoming a priority for many customers. What should the team do next?

   1. Prioritize the performance improvement toward the top of the sprint backlog so the team focuses on it

   2. Create a persona for the user who requested the feature

   3. Add the feature request to the product backlog for later consideration

   4. Create a non-functional requirements document and include the performance requirements in it

7. In XP, developers use the _________________ practice in order to review code changes as early as possible.

   1. Sit together

   2. Pair programming

   3. See the whole

   4. Regression testing

8. You are an agile practitioner on a team that is using Scrum. Halfway through a sprint, you find out that the main feature you’re working on is no longer needed by clients. Which is the BEST thing to do next?

   1. Finish the sprint and take the new priorities into account at the next backlog refinement session

   2. Re-prioritize the sprint backlog and have the team start working on the next highest priority as soon as possible

   3. Try to understand why the change happened so you can avoid having a change like that again

   4. A and C

9. Your team is getting ready to start a new sprint. The product owner refers to a requirements document for a large feature, and begins to break it down into user stories that can be planned in small increments. What is this practice called?

   1. Work breakdown structure

   2. Big requirements up front

   3. Just-in-time requirements refinement

   4. Waterfall approach

10. A tool for keeping agile teams focused on building small increments that solve a user need is:

    1. Kano analysis

    2. User stories

    3. Short subjects

    4. Emergent design

Exam Answers

1. Answer: D

   The reason for developing a product is the value it brings to a customer. Value is what makes the product viable, and drives all of the decisions an agile team makes during development.

2. Answer: A

   Agile teams try to break the product down into increments that provide value to the customer but can be released as soon as possible. These increments are sometimes called minimally marketable features (or MMFs).

3. Answer: D

   In the sprint review, the team demonstrates working software to the customer and gets feedback.

4. Answer: C

   Backlog refinement (also called product backlog review, or PBR) is an opportunity for the Product Owner to prioritize work collaboratively with the rest of the team.

5. Answer: C

   Doing the highest-risk work first is the best way to approach this problem. That way, if the project is going to fail and you can’t find the solution, it will fail fast and you’ll have the information the team learned by working on the feature to help you figure out what to do next.

6. Answer: A

   Non-functional requirements, like performance and quality concerns, should be prioritized along with features in the team’s backlog.

7. Answer: B

   Pair programming is a core XP practice that helps developers find defects before they’re more permanently embedded as technical debt in the codebase.

8. Answer: B

   There’s no point in finishing out the sprint if the work the team is doing won’t be useful. The best thing to do is to tell the team about the priority change right away, so that they can help determine the best way to deal with it. The sooner they can get working on the next high priority feature, the better.

9. Answer: C

   Decomposing the work into stories just before you plan an increment is called just-in-time requirements refinement. By breaking down the work right before the work begins, you’re sure to take any changes that might have happened to the requirements into account before you build.

10. Answer: B

    Teams use user stories to stay focused on building small, valuable pieces of software that solve specific user needs.

Exam Questions

1. Scrum teams demo working software at the end of each sprint in an event called _______________

   1. Sprint demo

   2. Sprint retrospective

   3. Sprint review

   4. Product demo

2. You are an agile practitioner on a newly created Scrum team. As part of the preparation for the team’s first sprint, you meet with some of the stakeholders for the product you’re going to build to understand their objectives. In that meeting, the group creates a list of features categorized as “Must have,” “Could have,” “Should have,” and “Won’t have.”

   What is the BEST way to describe the method of prioritization they’re using?

   1. Relative prioritization

   2. Stack ranking

   3. Kano analysis

   4. MoSCoW

3. What are the three questions each team member answers in a Daily Scrum meeting?

   1. What did I commit to doing today? What will I commit to doing by tomorrow? What mistakes have I made?

   2. What am I working on today? What will I work on tomorrow? What problems have I run into?

   3. What did I do today that brings us closer to our sprint goal? What will I do tomorrow that brings us closer to our sprint goal? What obstacles are in the team’s way?

   4. None of the above

4. Who makes decisions on behalf of business stakeholders on a Scrum team?

   1. Scrum master

   2. Product owner

   3. Agile practitioner

   4. Team member

5. Julie is working on a team that’s using Kanban to improve their process. Every day they put index cards on a board to show how many features are in each state of their process. Next, they add up the number of features in each column on the board and create an area chart that shows those totals over time. What tool are they using?

   1. Cumulative flow diagram

   2. Task board

   3. Burn down chart

   4. Burnup chart

6. Agile teams commit to business ___________ and sprint __________. They know that plans can change, and welcome those changes no matter when they happen. By focusing on what the team needs to achieve, they keep their options open.

   1. Leadership, deadlines

   2. Objectives, goals

   3. Forecasts, plans

   4. Demands, retrospectives

7. Which of the following is NOT a tool for providing stakeholder transparency in an agile team?

   1. Information radiators

   2. Feature demos

   3. Task boards

   4. Net present value

8. An agile team updated a daily burn down chart on the wall where they sit. What can stakeholders understand from looking at this chart?

   

   1. The project is running late

   2. The team is on track to meet its sprint goal

   3. The team ran into trouble on day 3

   4. Only project managers need the information in this chart

Exam Questions

1. You are an agile practitioner on a newly created Scrum team. As part of the team’s first planning session they decide to come up with a series of policies that the team will follow while working on their upcoming project. These policies include the following: “The Daily Scrum meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes and will start on time every day. A team member will never mark a feature complete until it satisfies the team’s definition of ‘done’. The team will use pre-defined coding standards and check code in for nightly builds.”

   What is the BEST way to describe the list of policies they’ve defined?

   1. Definition of ready

   2. Administrative guidelines

   3. Team charter

   4. Working agreements

2. You are an agile practitioner on a team building software for an advertising company. About halfway through your first increment, you notice that many features are showing as “In Progress” on your task board, but very few are in the “Done” column. One closer inspection, you see that developers are starting work on new features whenever they are waiting on code review or testing. What is the BEST thing for you to do next?

   1. Ask the team to help code review and testing to finish existing tasks before starting a new one

   2. Assume that the work will get done by the end of the sprint because the team has made progress on so many features

   3. Bring more testers onto the team to deal with the glut of features

   4. Tell the stakeholders that the team will not have anything ready to demo at the end of the sprint

3. Kim is an agile team member. Her team has four people on it and is four days into a two-week sprint. She just completed work on “Story 1,” the highest priority story in a five-story priority-ranked sprint backlog. This image shows the current state of her team’s task board. What should she do next?

   

   1. Move story 4 or story 5 to the “In Progress” column and start working on it

   2. Find a way to help work on story 2 or story 3 if possible

   3. Add a feature from the product backlog to the “In Progress” column and start working on it

   4. Wait for the Scrum Master to assign a new story

4. A software company is transforming its organization from using traditional software development practices to using agile methodologies. Which of the following is NOT a factor when deciding how to form agile teams?

   1. Teams should be co-located where possible

   2. Teams should be small

   3. Teams should have a documented change management process for dealing with late changes

   4. All of the above

5. You are an agile practitioner on a five-person team that is currently six days into a two-week sprint. An external stakeholder calls a team member to request an urgent change. What is the BEST thing for the team member to do?

   1. Drop what she is doing and make the change that the stakeholder requested

   2. Ask the stakeholder to work with the product owner to prioritize the change

   3. Advise the stakeholder to wait until the next sprint planning session and then bring it up

   4. Remind the stakeholder to prioritize the change in the product backlog

6. You are an agile practitioner on a team that builds financial software. During a sprint planning session with the team, a tester and a developer get into an argument about how big a story is. The developer says that the story is a small code change, so it should happen immediately. The tester says that it impacts many crucial areas of the software, and many tests will need to be run to make sure that it works. What should you do next?

   1. Side with the tester and recommend that the team allot more time for the feature

   2. Side with the developer and cut tests to make sure that the feature is delivered sooner

   3. Suggest that the team use planning poker to discuss their assumptions and come up with an approach and size for the feature that everyone agrees to

   4. Ask the product owner to prioritize the tests based on how important the functionality is to the end users

7. You are an agile practitioner on a team that builds software. One of your teammates is expected to work on two projects at once. The person’s functional manager has asked the team to expect him to be 50% allocated on the agile team and 50% allocated to a functional support team. What is the BEST thing for you to do next?

   1. Help your teammate find a way to avoid over-committing to stories in sprint planning

   2. Tell the functional manager that agile teams require team members focus on their tasks, and the team member should not be allocated to two teams at once

   3. Make sure the team doesn’t over-commit because resources are not fully allocated

   4. Make sure that the person only spends four hours per day working on the other team

Exam Answers

1. Answer: C

   The sprint review is the main opportunity for the team to demonstrate working software at the end of each sprint. All of the project stakeholders attend the demo and provide feedback on the software. That feedback is incorporated back into the product backlog, which the team uses to plan future sprints.

2. Answer: D

   These stakeholders are using the MoSCoW method for prioritization. It helps the team understand the business perspective on the features in the backlog.

3. Answer: C

   The Daily Scrum questions focus on what the team is doing to get closer to achieving this sprint goal. Just telling the team what each individual is working on can cause team members to focus too much on their own perspective, and to lose sight of the goal the team is working toward.

4. Answer: B

   The Product Owner acts as a proxy for business stakeholders in a Scrum team. The Product Owner communicates business priorities, and makes decisions for the team that will help them meet each sprint goal.

5. Answer: A

   The question describes the process that a team would take to create a cumulative flow diagram (CFD). They’re also using a Kanban board as a means of figuring out the numbers to map on the CFD, but “Kanban board” was not one of the choices available for this question.

6. Answer: B

   Agile teams commit to business objectives and sprint goals. They try to decide on the exact route they’ll take to achieving those objectives as late as possible.

7. Answer: D

   Net Present Value (NPV) might help your team decide whether or not to do a project, but it’s not a practical tool for keeping stakeholders informed about what’s going on with your project.

8. Answer: B

   A burn down chart is an effective way to keep everyone on the team and all of your stakeholders in the loop about daily progress toward a goal. This burn down shows that the team will most likely complete the work they committed to by the end of the sprint because the line that shows the amount of work left is below the line.

Exam Answers

1. Answer: D

   Agile teams work to define their working agreements when they start working together. That way, all team members know what to expect when they’re working with the group.

2. Answer: A

   Teams work most efficiently when they focus on getting each task completely finished (“Done” done) before moving on to the next one. That’s why agile teams value members who focus on being “generalizing specialists” that do whatever they can to move their work through all stages of development. By focusing on collaborating and making the work flow, the whole team gets more done and creates a higher-quality product together. In this case, it means that everyone on the team has the skills to help with code review and testing.

3. Answer: B

   The team works on the stories in order of priority, so we know that stories 2 and 3 in the “In Progress” column are more valuable than stories 4 and 5 in the “To Do” column. Teams should focus on completing the highest priority work as soon possible and on finishing work before starting new work. If Kim can help her teammates get story 2 or 3 done faster, she should do that instead of starting work on another story. Since agile teams are self-organizing, she shouldn’t have to wait for the Scrum Master to tell her which story to work on next.

4. Answer: C

   Teams should be small and co-located so that they can easily collaborate with one another and find new and better ways of working. Agile teams also value responding to change, especially changes in priority, as urgently as possible. However, they typically do not focus on creating well-documented change management processes, as they are often focused on slowing down the rate of change in a project.

5. Answer: B

   The product owner maintains the backlog and the priority order of work for the team. If an external stakeholder needs a change, the team member should ask that stakeholder to work with the product owner to figure out where the change fits into the team’s backlog.

6. Answer: C

   Planning poker is built for situations like this, because it helps teams to come together on an approach and agree on the size of the effort. In this case, the tester could explain why the code change affects so many tests, and the developer and tester could jointly come up with approaches for dealing with the problem.

   There are a lot of different approaches that this particular team can take. Developers can write automated unit tests (serving as generalizing specialists and helping to shoulder some of the quality work). They can also pay special attention to pair programming and unit testing, if the area they are modifying is critical to the product. Testers could write tests in parallel with development, and take part in code reviews so that they know what to expect from the feature when it’s delivered. These are all ideas that might come up during a planning poker session. Choosing a specific approach will help them come up with a relative size for the story, and get a more accurate sense of what they need to do in order to deliver it.

7. Answer: B

   Agile teams expect 100% of a team member’s focus and time, and recognize that compromising on that can lead to significant problems. When one person is shared between teams, it leads to a large amount of task-switching that causes a lot of waste. As an agile practitioner, you should work to influence the person’s functional manager, and try to convince him or her to allocate that person 100% to the agile team.

Answers in “In Your Own Words Solution: Domain 5: Exam Questions”

Adapt your leadership style as the team evolves

You may see a few questions on the PMI-ACP® exam about adaptive leadership, a useful theoretical concept that can help leaders improve how they lead their teams. Applying adaptive leadership to a specific team starts the stages of team formation.

A few last tools and techniques

There are just a few more tools and techniques that you might see on the PMI-ACP® exam. Luckily, they’re very straightforward, and should fit in easily with what you’ve already learned.

Risk-adjusted backlog, pre-mortem, and risk burn down charts

When a team maintains a risk-adjusted backlog, they include risk items in the backlog and prioritize them along with the other backlog items. This means:

• When the team encounters a risk, it gets added to the backlog—risk backlog items are prioritized by value and effort, just like any other backlog item

• One way teams identify risks is to hold a pre-mortem, where they imagine that the project has failed catastrophically and brainstorm the reasons that caused the failure

• When the team plans an iteration, they include risk items along with other items in the iteration backlog

• They create an estimate for each risk backlog, using exactly the same estimation techniques that they already use to generate estimates for other product backlog items

• When the team performs backlog refinement (which they sometimes call “grooming” or “PBR”), they update, review, re-estimate, and re-prioritize the risk backlog items along with the rest of the items in the backlog

• You might see risks referred to as threats and potential issues on the exam

• When the team maintains a risk-adjusted backlog that includes relative size estimates for risk items, they can use those estimates to create a risk burn down chart for each iteration (so, for example, a Scrum team might create a risk burn down graph that shows the sum of the story points for all risk items left in the sprint backlog)

A few last tools and techniques

There are just a few more tools and techniques that you might see on the PMI-ACP® exam. Luckily, they’re very straightforward, and should fit in easily with what you’ve already learned.

Exam Questions

1. An agile team just finished a sprint planning session for sprint 5 of an ongoing project. They used planning poker to come up with the following story point values for their stack-ranked backlog:

   

   Based on the team’s velocity histogram above, what is the last story they should expect to deliver in this sprint?

   1. Story 3

   2. Story 5

   3. Story 6

   4. Story 4

2. An agile team is four days into a two-week sprint when one of their stakeholders asks for the status of the current sprint. The team directs the stakeholder to the team’s burn up chart. What can the stakeholder tell from the information in the chart?

   

   1. The team is running behind

   2. Scope has been added

   3. The team is ahead of schedule

   4. There isn’t enough data to know status

3. You’re an agile practitioner on a team that builds mobile apps. One of your teammates identified a problem during the last retrospective, pointing out that the team’s velocity was getting lower with each two-week sprint. Afterward, you find that the user stories the team is working on are often too big to be completed in one sprint, often carrying over into the next three or four sprints before they are completed. What do you do next?

   1. Work with the product owner to identify a sprint goal that can be accomplished in the next sprint, and then decompose the stories in that sprint so that all of them can be delivered in two weeks

   2. Carry the stories over from sprint to sprint, but forecast that they will all be completed in the product’s next major release

   3. Work with the team to get better at delivering big stories faster

   4. Stop committing to individual sprint goals, and commit to release goals instead

4. Sarah is a scrum master on a team that develops games. She’s noticed that her team often commits to much more work in a sprint than they can accomplish. When she brought it up in the team’s retrospective, she learned that her teammates are often pulled off of development tasks to deal with maintenance requests for production software, which interrupts the flow of work for them. What should she do next?

   1. Create backlog items for the maintenance requests, estimate them, and include them in sprint planning so that the team can include those requests in its sprint commitments

   2. Work with the team to create a buffer in the amount the team commits to, so that they don’t over-commit when they know the maintenance requests will happen

   3. Tell the support group that the development team will no longer be responding to maintenance requests

   4. None of the above

5. Agile teams often create special tasks for teams to investigate approaches to solving high-risk design problems. What are these special tasks called?

   1. Exploratory work

   2. Buffers

   3. Slack

   4. Risk-based spikes

6. Teams will often prioritize risks, issues, and threats above other work because solving those items will mean success or failure for the whole project. What is the practice of prioritizing these items called?

   1. Risk-ranking

   2. Backlog refinement

   3. Risk-adjusted backlog

   4. None of the above

Exam Answers

1. Answer: D

   Since the stories are in priority order, the team should try to deliver stories 1-4. The total size of the effort for those four stories adds up to 21 story points, which is what the team delivered in the last sprint.

2. Answer: C

   According to the chart, the team committed to deliver around 28 points in this sprint. On day 4 they were already at 20 points complete. It’s very likely that they’re ahead of schedule.

3. Answer: A

   All of the stories in the sprint backlog should be sized so that they can be completed within a sprint, which according to the question lasts two weeks. The product owner should be working to help the team to deliver as much value as possible at the end of each increment. If the team stays focused on large releases, they won’t get the benefits of early validation that come with releasing small increments more frequently.

4. Answer: A

   The team can’t plan their work if they don’t put all of it in the backlog. Just because a work item is coming from a different stakeholder than usual (in this case, the support team), that doesn’t mean that the team should ignore it. If the work is valuable to the organization, that work should be prioritized, estimated, and planned along with new feature work by the product owner as part of the backlog refinement and sprint planning process.

5. Answer: D

   Risk-based spikes allow agile teams to time box their effort in researching high-risk functionality so that teams can “fail fast” if there is no solution to the problem.

6. Answer: C

   A risk-adjusted backlog includes planned features and work items, but also includes problems, issues, and threats—in other words, a backlog that also includes risk items that can be prioritized by risk as well as value. This helps you and your team to focus on understanding your risks first, which can help prevent your project from running into trouble (and even failing!) later on.

Answers in “In Your Own Words Solution: Domain 6: Exam Questions”

Answers in “In Your Own Words Solution: Domain 7: Exam Questions”

Exam Questions

1. Agile teams often maintain an ordered list of work items and put the highest-risk items at the top of the list so that they get worked on first. What is the BEST name of this practice?

   1. Rank ordering

   2. Mitigation plan

   3. Risk-adjusted backlog

   4. Weighted shortest job first

2. You are an agile practitioner on a software team. Your team is holding a meeting to plan the next sprint. During the team’s estimation for one of the work items, two team members disagree about the technical approach to the problem. Both of their solutions seem plausible to the rest of the team. The team needs to come to a resolution quickly, because that specific work item is a core piece of functionality that later sprints will depend on.

   What is the BEST solution to the problem?

   1. Have the whole team work on solving this problem before starting any other work

   2. Create an architectural spike for each of the two solutions, building them both over the course of the sprint in order to learn which one works best

   3. Preserve your options by not starting the work until later in the project

   4. Write down the disagreement as a risk and decide a solution later in the project

3. You are an agile practitioner on a software team. Your team has been together for three sprints, but lately they’ve been having a hard time getting along. Some members of the team think that others don’t have the technical experience to make changes to core sections of the code base that the team is working on. This results in many disagreements during Daily Scrum and sprint planning meetings. How would you BEST describe the team and the managing technique you should use to deal with it?

   1. Forming stage, Directing managing technique

   2. Storming stage, Coaching managing technique

   3. Norming stage, Supporting managing technique

   4. Performing stage, Delegating managing technique

4. When a Scrum team meets to inspect the plan that they are working on and make adjustments so that they can accomplish their goals, that practice is called ____________________.

   1. The plan inspection meeting

   2. The planning approval gate

   3. The Daily Scrum

   4. The status report

5. Whenever a programmer commits code to the repository, tests are automatically run on it and the code is compiled. Which of the followng BEST describes this?

   1. Code review

   2. Breaking the build

   3. Using a build server

   4. Continuous deployment

6. You are an agile practitioner on a software team that has been together for the last two years now. You and your teammates have developed a rapport. Any time there’s a problem, everyone generally knows who to call or what to do. Individual team members have different interests and focus on different kinds of problems, but they generally have no trouble coming together to accomplish their sprint goals. How would you BEST describe the team and the managing technique you should use to deal with it?

   1. Forming stage, Directing managing technique

   2. Storming stage, Coaching managing technique

   3. Norming stage, Supporting managing technique

   4. Performing stage, Delegating managing technique

7. You are an agile practitioner on a software team. This is the first sprint that your team has worked together, and they don’t know much about each other. They all have their own skills and goals, and haven’t really worked out a good way to communicate about the project just yet. How would you BEST describe the team and the managing technique you should use to deal with it?

   1. Forming stage, Directing managing technique

   2. Storming stage, Coaching managing technique

   3. Norming stage, Supporting managing technique

   4. Performing stage, Delegating managing technique

8. At the beginning of the project, a team identifies a list of possible threats to project success. They printed out all of the risks in a large font, and taped them to a whiteboard for everyone to see in a central location in the office. The team gathers periodically to discuss and review these identified risks. What practice is the team using?

   1. Weekly risk review

   2. Steering committee meeting

   3. Risk approval gate

   4. Information radiator

Exam Questions

1. Agile team members are always learning new skills to help their teams complete work. Instead of having a very narrow and deep focus, they are ____________________ who can do multiple things on a team.

   1. Generalizing specialists

   2. Shallow contributors

   3. Experienced development leads

   4. Highly specialized developers

2. The main artifact of a sprint retrospective is ____________________.

   1. A list of accomplishments

   2. A set of improvement actions

   3. A set of meeting minutes

   4. A list of challenges

3. You are an agile practitioner on a software team. At the end of each sprint, you and your team demonstrate to the product owner the changes the team has made, and listen to his or her feedback about those changes. What is the BEST way to describe this practice?

   1. Daily scrum

   2. Product demo

   3. Product owner approval

   4. Sprint review

4. You are an agile practitioner on a team that builds mobile games. A member of your team has a new technical design for one of the features that’s in the product backlog. When she brings it up to the team, some teammates are skeptical that it will work. Everyone agrees that if it does work it will be a significant improvement to the game’s performance, and will be much easier to maintain than the current design. What is the BEST thing for the team to do next?

   1. Suggest that the team member stick with the current design since the team already knows it will work

   2. Suggest that the team member write up a design document and run it by the stakeholders for approval

   3. Suggest that the team member create a spike and try out the solution to see if it will work

   4. Suggest that the team stop work on the existing design because it’s slower than the one the team member described

5. You are on a software development team. During a retrospective, one person says most of the work in the last three sprints has focused on part of the codebase that only half of the team is familiar with, and as a result those people have been doing most of the valuable work during those sprints, and that they’ve been forced to add lower-value items to the sprint backlog in order to keep the rest of the team busy. Another person agrees with this assessment, and adds that there were serious bugs caused by unfamiliarity with that code. What is the BEST way to improve this situation?

   1. Break the work down into smaller chunks so the team can feel like they’re accomplishing more

   2. Start pair programming all of the work that the team does so that people get more familiar with the code and can help each other catch bugs earlier

   3. Plan the work so that everyone is busy

   4. Limit the amount of work in progress so that team members don’t have so much to do

6. Which of the following is NOT a tool used in retrospectives to get team consensus on improvements?

   1. Dot voting

   2. MoSCoW

   3. Fist-of-five voting

   4. Ishikawa diagrams

7. An agile team has just completed a two-week sprint. One of the team’s stakeholders asks for the status of the risks that were identified in planning. The team directs the stakeholder to the team’s risk burn down chart. What can the stakeholder tell from the information in the chart?

   

   1. The team did not close out all of the risks that they identified in planning

   2. Scope has been added

   3. The team is ahead of schedule

   4. There isn’t enough data to understand the status of the risks

Exam Answers

1. Answer: C

   Agile teams maintain a risk-adjusted backlog to ensure that they work through the highest-risk items in the earliest sprints possible. Sometimes failing to solve a high-risk item can cause a whole project to fail and agile teams are always trying to fail as fast as possible, so they do those items first.

2. Answer: B

   When the team has two equally viable solutions but can’t decide on one, it often makes sense to pursue both of them at the same time. Creating an architectural spike to let the team explore both options will most likely give the team the information they need in order to make an informed decision in the next sprint planning session.

3. Answer: B

   This team hasn’t been together very long and they are arguing in Daily Scrums and planning meetings. It sounds like they’re in the Storming phase of development. They will need the agile practitioner to take on a coaching role to help them get through their disagreements.

4. Answer: C

   Scrum teams use the Daily Scrum to inspect their plan and make adjustments so that they can achieve their sprint goals. If some team members are having trouble with their work, others help them get rid of any impediments and finish what they set out to accomplish.

5. Answer: C

   This is an example of a team using a build server. Whenever a team member makes a commit, all of the unit tests are run on the code and the entire repository is compiled. That way the whole team will know if there’s a breaking change to the code as early as possible. If the tests fail or the code won’t compile, the team knows that the problem is coming from the change that was just committed. Then the programmer who made that change can fix it before it causes other problems down the line.

   Note

   Were you expecting to see “Continuous integration” as one of the answers? Using a build server isn’t the same thing as continuous integration, which is when team members continuously integrate code from their working folders back into the version control system to find problems early.

6. Answer: D

   This team is performing. They all know what their teammates are capable of and have established a way of working that takes advantage of each other’s strengths. It’s typically most effective to delegate to them, and to let them keep doing what they’re doing.

7. Answer: A

   This team is forming. They will look to you to make most of the decisions until they become more comfortable with each other, so the directing style of management is most appropriate.

8. Answer: D

   Displaying the risks up on a whiteboard for everyone in the project to see and review is an example of an information radiator. It’s a good way to keep the risks that the team identified in everyone’s mind so that everyone’s aware of them, and can ask for help if they cause problems.

Exam Answers

1. Answer: A

   Agile teams value generalizing specialists who can apply a wide range of skills wherever they’re needed, so that they can add value in many ways throughout a product’s delivery timeline.

2. Answer: B

   The goal of a retrospective should be specific actions that the team can take to make the process, system, or method that they’re following more useful, streamlined, and collaborative for the team.

3. Answer: D

   This question is describing the sprint review that occurs at the end of every Scrum sprint. In it, the product owner provides valuable feedback on the work product of the sprint. In some cases, that product owner will provide feedback, which will be added to the product backlog and incorporated into upcoming sprints in order of relative priority.

4. Answer: C

   The team member should build a spike solution, in which she tries out her idea to see if it will work. Everyone on the team needs to be able to make mistakes. If the expectations on the team are so closely managed that team members have no freedom to decide as they go, they will not be able innovate or keep their options open.

5. Answer: B

   When teams are highly specialized, pair programming can be a good way to break down barriers and help people to understand code they might not have worked with before. Pairing someone who’s less familiar with the code with someone who knows it very well can spark great discussions between them; this is a very effective way to ramp people up on parts of the codebase that they are not familiar with yet. Pair programming also helps teams to catch bugs earlier and deliver a higher quality product, because pairs are constantly reviewing the code even as it’s writtten.

6. Answer: B

   MoSCoW is a tool for prioritization. The rest of the answers offered are used in retrospectives.

7. Answer: A

   The team identified more story points in risk reduction than they were able to complete within the sprint. In the last four days of the sprint the team did not make progress on any risk items. Instead, the sprint closed with roughly 15 points of risk mitigation effort still outstanding. Therefore, there are still planned risks that were not closed out.

Are you ready for the final exam?

Congratulations! Take a minute and think about how much you’ve learned about agile. Now it’s time to test your knowledge and see how well you’re prepared to take the PMI-ACP® exam. The last chapter in this book is a full length, 120-question, simulated PMI-ACP® exam, carefully constructed using the same exam content outline as the real thing and using questions that have style and content similar to what you’ll see on exam day. Here are a few tips to make it as effective as possible:

• When you take the final exam in the next chapter, make it the only study activity that you do that day.

• Give yourself plenty of time to do it, and take the whole exam all at once.

• Make sure you drink lots of water while you’re answering the questions.

  Note

  Your brain actually learns better when it’s well-hydrated!

• As you’re answering the questions, think about each answer and only mark down one response, even if you’re not 100% sure.

• After every 10 questions, go back and read through each of them again, and see if you still agree with your answer.

• Don’t look at any of the exam answers until you’ve gone through all of the questions.

• Make sure you get plenty of sleep the night after you take the practice exam. That helps the information stick in your brain!