Last Updated on March 18, 2022 by Admin 2

PMI-ACP : PMI Agile Certified Practitioner : Part 35

  1. A project sponsor is upset that an enhancement will be unavailable until next year.

    What should the product owner do?

    • Accept responsibility for the product’s delay.
    • Ensure that the project sponsor’s priorities are in the product backlog.
    • Negotiate with the project sponsor for increased funding.
    • Empower the project sponsor to manage the product backlog.
  2. A team working with a new technology faces a significant amount of uncertainty about its ability to deliver stories due to technical issues.

    What should the team do?

    • Capture risks and make them visible, and use a burn down chart to focus on reducing risks early in the project.
    • Ask the scrum master to extend the sprint’s duration to allow more time to work through technical issues.
    • Place the impacted stories on the story board, and use daily stand ups to make the product owner aware of the technical issues.
    • Seek guidance from the development manager.
  3. At the retrospective, the burndown chart shows that the project is slightly behind schedule. The project team identifies an inexperienced software engineer as the source of reduced velocity.

    How should the project team address this issue?

    • Suggest pair programming during the retrospective.
    • Ask the product owner to re-prioritize the user stories at the next retrospective.
    • Re-estimate the story points with team members at the next iteration planning meeting.
    • Assign less complex user stories to the inexperienced software engineer at the next iteration planning meeting.
  4. During the implementation of a story, a scrum team notifies the scrum master of a technical challenge that is causing a delay.

    What should the scrum master advise the team to do?

    • Implement the story since the team is running behind schedule.
    • Create a spike to finalize the story’s technical approach.
    • Transfer the story to a scrum team experienced in solving similar problems.
    • Ask the product owner to reduce the story’s priority and wait until more technical details are available.
  5. A key stakeholder cannot attend the project vision statement development workshop. The stakeholder has emailed their requirements to the agile team lead, and believes that the vision statement is not critical.

    How should the agile team lead respond?

    • Emphasize to the stakeholder that a common, detailed vision will better ensure team understanding of the project.
    • Personally meet with the stakeholder to understand their requirements, and then share the vision with the team.
    • Work with the team to create a vision from the stakeholder’s supplied requirements.
    • Explain to the team that creating a vision is not critical in agile projects, as requirements may change over time.
  6. Midway through a two-week sprint, an agile team realizes that the features cannot be delivered within the sprint. The team determines that another week will be required to complete all committed features.

    What should the team do?

    • Plan for overtime, and include the effort as part of the estimation.
    • Increase team velocity to deliver more story points.
    • Identify the reason for over-commitment to the sprint and create an action plan for the following sprint.
    • Add resources to assist with sprint execution.
  7. A product owner obtains customer confirmation on product requirements and provides them to the team. After explaining the user stories, the product owner receives agreement for acceptance from the team.

    What should the team do next?

    • Use agile estimation techniques to create a shared understanding of when the user stories will be completed.
    • Agree upon development and testing activities for the user stories.
    • Complete the user stories, and provide a demo for the product owner and customer.
    • Complete the user stories, and hold a retrospective to discuss them.
  8. After three iterations, it is identified that a project’s underlying security structure architecture is unstable. While there is a technical solution, all work to date is flawed. This will impact several future business service offerings.

    What should the product owner do to resolve this?

    • Ask the development team to address the issue since it is in their domain.
    • Review the project’s risk matrix, and follow the steps outlined in the risk mitigation plan.
    • Meet with the team and stakeholders to address rework and rewrite stories as needed.
    • Cancel the current sprint, and meet with stakeholders to reassess the project’s validity.
  9. An agile team and a traditional development team are working together on a project. Each team exceeds expectations regarding deliverables; however, issues arise when the deliverables are integrated.

    What should the agile practitioner do?

    • Foster stronger communication by hosting cross-organizational meetings between the two teams.
    • Suggest merging the teams to avoid misunderstandings.
    • Create stories from full technical specifications to avoid ambiguity.
    • Co-locate the teams to encourage osmotic communication.
  10. An agile team delivered a feature in the last iteration. The product owner, who missed the planning and review meetings, was dissatisfied with the feature. The team conducted a retrospective and reviewed the user stories related it.

    What should the agile team do next?

    • Ensure that the product owner reviews the acceptance criteria for delivered user stories.
    • Augment the quality assurance and continuous integration processes for delivery.
    • Approach the relevant developers and testers regarding quality issues in upcoming iterations.
    • Ask the product owner to define the entire scope of delivery two to three iterations in advance.
  11. An agile team lead is assigned to a project that must ensure data security.

    What should the team lead do to guarantee that security, as a non-functional requirement, is managed throughout the project?

    • Include security concerns on the agenda for every meeting.
    • Request that a security expert be added to the team.
    • Add security as a non-functional requirement to the risk register, and review regularly.
    • Ensure that planning and prioritizing includes consideration of security requirements.
  12. An agile team has been in place for five years and the customer is satisfied with the team’s performance and deliverables. Now that the product is built and delivered, the customer is considering the future role of the Scrum Master.

    What should the customer do?

    • Expand the Scrum Master’s role to other projects, while allowing them to support the current project.
    • Release the Scrum Master, since the team is adequately skilled with agile practices.
    • Expand the product owner’s role to serve as the Scrum Master, while providing additional product knowledge.
    • Increase the functional manager’s role to act as the Scrum Master, while providing additional information about functional areas.
  13. An agile team’s client has been asked to expedite the delivery of the next release. By delivering one month early, the company can generate US$40,000 more than expected for the quarter.

    What should the agile team do?

    • Adhere to the new deadline and immediately advise the client that the schedule has been expedited.
    • Advise the client that it is best to continue as planned rather than introduce unforeseen risks by expediting the schedule.
    • Submit a change request to the client with a 50% increase in charges due to the new potential profit.
    • Request additional resources to meet the expedited deadline and obtain training for the new resources.
  14. During a retrospective, team members suggest process improvement ideas. The agile team lead knows that, while many of these ideas are different from standard practices, a few of them are good.

    What should the agile team lead do?

    • Require the team to try only those ideas that will ensure success.
    • Allow the team to try ideas, but remind them that results will be reviewed by high-ranking executives.
    • Associate idea successes and failures with the team’s incentive plan to ensure accountability.
    • Encourage the team to try the ideas, even if failure may be the outcome.
  15. After a successful product deployment, a key stakeholder informs an agile team member that an implemented feature is failing to deliver its expected business value. The team member replies that the requirement was provided by the customer, and that the scope was clearly met.

    If the problem were an issue of requirement elicitation rather than delivery, what should have been done to avoid this situation?

    • Stakeholders should have regularly been engaged to obtain feedback and reduce the functionality risk.
    • The team should have used the lean principle of delay, so that actual facts could be considered rather than assumptions and predictions.
    • Interdependent teams should have been engaged using a collaborative approach to identify and leverage the best support.
    • An owner should have been identified to obtain timely stakeholder feedback.
  16. The product owner wants to build security firewalls into the product.

    How can the team members support this?

    • Add new security features to the backlog and prioritize.
    • Execute a spike to research security features for the project.
    • Ask questions to determine where and how the product owner wants to use the product.
    • Ask questions to determine if the product owner can define the desired level of security.
  17. How should a project leader manage stakeholder expectations in an agile project?

    • Establish a common vision and success criteria and involve all the stakeholders in the iteration reviews.
    • Invite stakeholders for the iteration reviews but do not include new stakeholders which may limit project success.
    • Involve all the stakeholders in iteration reviews but do not entertain all expectations of all stakeholders.
    • Communicate issues to all stakeholders via email and only communicate risks to internal stakeholders.
  18. There is a database feature requiring three members of a seven person team. A meeting is scheduled at the beginning of the sprint to go over technical needs to complete the story.

    Who should the Scrum Master invite to the meeting?

    • The core team and the customer
    • The product owner and key stakeholders
    • The customer and the sponsor
    • The core team and the product owner
  19. What estimation technique is an agile team using when collectively estimating the relative size of its stories using story points?

    • Parametric
    • One-to-one comparison
    • Affinity
    • Planning poker

    Explanation:

    Reference: https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=TYoLAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=scrum+estimation+technique+is+an+agile+team+using+when+collectively+estimating+the+relative+size+of+its+stories+using+story+points&source=bl&ots=MmVGsgmWXk&sig=ACfU3U2g-4srCxMdsi4DXwynCFrrvSBZow&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj12IeO5t3pAhWURhUIHQUyDcwQ6AEwCXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=scrum%20estimation%20technique%20is%20an%20agile%20team%20using%20when%20collectively%20estimating%20the%20relative%20size%20of%20its%20stories%20using%20story%20points&f=false

  20. The team underestimated the complexity of a story, resulting in new decomposition of the work to be delivered in the current sprint and items to be returned to the backlog.

    What should the Scrum Master do next?

    • Ask the project manager to work with the product owner to help generate clearer stories in the future.
    • Develop guidelines to prevent future occurrences.
    • During the retrospective, discuss the issue and create an action plan to avoid it in the future.
    • Allow the team to devise a corrective action without external intervention.