Last Updated on March 18, 2022 by Admin 2

PMI-ACP : PMI Agile Certified Practitioner : Part 34

  1. An event management team is following an agile approach to prepare for an upcoming conference. The regional sales manager, from where the conference is to be held, contacts the team with a number of questions about the company’s booth.

    What should the team do?

    • Inform the sponsor about the regional sales manager’s disruptiveness and ask that all questions be diverted to the weekly meetings.
    • Stay focused on the current iteration and let the project manager deal with the regional sales manager’s questions.
    • Invite the regional sales manager to the next iteration review to share the progress.
    • Create a risk on the risk register to account for some potentially new requirements from the regional sales manager.
  2. During a project’s last few sprints, an agile practitioner notices an increase in defects. A root-cause analysis indicates that a poor understanding of the requirements was caused by the inability of the product owner to communicate clearly.

    What should the agile practitioner do?

    • Inform the product owner’s manager so that corrective action may be taken.
    • Communicate this to the product owner, and offer to help facilitate discussions with the team.
    • Encourage a team member to raise this during the retrospective to ensure that the product owner is aware.
    • Escalate this issue to the sponsor so that corrective action may be taken.
  3. During an iteration, an agile team discovers infrastructure requirements that were not initially considered.

    What should the team do to effectively manage this?

    • Rework the iteration scope to accommodate these requirements.
    • Add these requirements into the product backlog for future consideration.
    • Raise the discovery of these requirements as an issue, and escalate to management.
    • Immediately start working on these requirements.
  4. What should the agile practitioner know about tracking velocity?

    • A team with an average velocity of 50 is twice as efficient as a team with an average velocity of 25.
    • A team with an average velocity of 50 is equally as efficient as a team with an average velocity of 25.
    • A team that consistently meets its planned velocity is more efficient than a team that consistently exceeds its planned velocity.
    • A team that consistently meets its planned velocity is less efficient than a team that constantly exceeds its planned velocity.
  5. An agile project leader is delivering a team kick-off session. The first exercise is a “Life Timeline” – a story-telling exercise where each team member tells their life story, explains how they experienced the highs and lows of their journey, and identifies their fears and hopes.

    What is the project leader trying to create?

    • A safe space for team members to learn to trust one another, leading to collaborative relationships.
    • A safe space for team members to learn to be vulnerable, leading to high performance relationships.
    • A safe space for team members to learn to share, leading to collaborative relationships.
    • A safe space for team members to learn about each other’s weaknesses and strengths.
  6. On what should an agile team work to achieve predictable flow?

    • Small user stories
    • Simple acceptance criteria
    • Lean features
    • Lean backlogs
  7. Following an upgrade, a software support team is overwhelmed by the number of tickets being submitted by end users. The team’s manager is pushing the team to “work smart” by focusing on activities that deliver the most value in the least amount of time.

    What should the team do?

    • Work longer hours to complete more of the support backlog.
    • Work support tickets in the order in which they were received.
    • Place tickets on hold until the team completes an analysis of the backlog to identify and resolve systemic issues.
    • Add members to the support team.
  8. Why should an agile coach model agile principles and behaviors, become self-aware, and be present?

    • To better listen, serve and help the team grow their strengths individually and as a team
    • To convince people what they need to do
    • To help better disguise the command and control approach
    • To understand team dynamics and develop a high performing team
  9. A scrum master assumes a project that is essential to organizational growth. The project is expected to be in production for three years.

    What should the scrum master do first?

    • Work with the customers to build the product backlog and identify their initial requirements.
    • Meet with the stakeholders and enterprise architects to understand the project’s vision.
    • Plan and execute a sprint 0 to establish the project’s foundational needs.
    • Create a backlog, and execute a sprint 1 to quickly deliver value to the customers.
  10. What should a team consider when calculating the effort needed to complete a product backlog?

    • The increase in velocity and cost
    • A buffer in the sprint to mitigate unexpected risks
    • Assigning extra points to each task to allow time for changes
    • Stories describing infrastructure tasks and analysis tasks
  11. At the end of a product development phase, an agile project team confirms that all tests have passed. The product is released, but the customer complains that it is deficient.

    What should the project team have done prior to product release?

    • Requested approval from the project sponsor
    • Undertaken a review of all requirements
    • Conducted an end-of-phase demonstration
    • Performed a retrospective to validate project deliverables
  12. The amount of information captured in the project’s defects is varying within the development team. Team members are becoming frustrated with the defect quality inconsistencies and the frequent clarification required.

    What should be done to address the issue?

    • Stop the current iteration to discuss defect quality issues and explore solutions.
    • Discuss and explore solutions in the next planning meeting and take corrective actions as required.
    • Generate insights at the next retrospective and adjust processes as decided by the team.
    • Assign corrective actions to the backlog for the team to identify the mandatory defect information.
  13. A new project starts and team members are pooled together to execute it. The team works together and moves from the forming stage into the storming stage. However, potentially destructive conflicts are now arising.

    What should the agile coach do to develop members into a high-performance team?

    • Teach the team how to work comfortably in chaos.
    • Provide strong facilitation and conflict-resolution guidance.
    • Allow the team to resolve issues on their own.
    • Observe each team member and advise them on team relationships.
  14. An agile team is unable to complete all its planned sprint user stories, which results in a decrease of its planned sprint velocity.

    What should the team do?

    • Re-estimate the sprint’s completed stories to increase and adjust the sprint’s velocity.
    • Increase the duration of the next sprint to accommodate the incomplete user stories and maintain velocity.
    • Work with the product owner to create a spike with another agile team.
    • Re-estimate the incomplete stories for the next sprint because its relative size has changed.
  15. Two teams have received project requirements and completed estimates. Team A estimates 420 story points for scope and 30 story points for velocity per sprint. Team B estimates 280 story points for scope and 20 story points for velocity per sprint. Both teams have same number of team members and have an assumed sprint duration of 2 weeks.

    What can an agile practitioner conclude about team A and team B’s estimates?

    • Team B has underestimated scope compared to team A.
    • Team A is more confident in delivering velocity than team B.
    • Both teams need to indicate their proposed technology before the estimates can be analyzed.
    • Both teams have estimated the project to be of same size.
  16. What is the first thing an agile development team should do when planning an iteration?

    • Assign the tasks to one team member.
    • Separate the stories into tasks.
    • Estimate the stories’ tasks.
    • Help establish the next sprint’s goal.

    Explanation:

    Reference: https://resources.collab.net/agile-101/agile-sprint-planning-iteration-planning

  17. The project team is ahead of schedule and beginning to gold-plate the feature included in the current sprint.

    What should the agile project manager do?

    • Since the team has extra time, notify the product owner and secure approval for the extra work on this feature.
    • Encourage the team to document the improvement and prioritize it for the upcoming iteration, instead of building it now.
    • Instruct the Scrum Master to have the team use the extra time to complete the extra feature work in the current iteration.
    • Notify the product owner and have the product owner verify the backlog priority, then encourage team to continue working on the backlog.
  18. Unable to meet a sprint’s committed velocity, an agile team approaches the agile coach to define the next sprint’s velocity.

    What should the agile coach advise?

    • Split each story into multiple stories to meet the desired velocity.
    • Set the velocity to the delivered story points of the last sprint.
    • Use different estimation methods for stories and defects to meet the desired velocity.
    • Re-estimate by assigning more story points to smaller stories to increase the velocity.
  19. Throughout the project, an agile practitioner notices that one team member is becoming an emergent leader.

    What should an agile practitioner do?

    • Present opportunities in order to be supportive and grow that team member’s talents.
    • Encourage the team member to fit in more with the established team norms.
    • Bring this to management’s attention so they don’t disrupt the team.
    • Ask team member to respect defined roles on the project to avoid confusion with the team.
  20. A project manager is concerned that the team has misaligned expectations with some stakeholders, and that user stories were written only from a generic user’s perspective. This may lead the team to miss stories for non-generic users.

    What agile tools can help the team address these issues?

    • Information radiators and wireframes
    • Information radiators and story maps
    • Process flows and personas
    • Personas and extreme characters