ASM - Agile Scrum Master (EXIN) (Answered) Complete Solution

ASM - Agile Scrum Master (EXIN) (Answered) Complete Solution A product manager wants to start a new product-related project. She wonders whether Agile methods would add value to this. You can say that the project would be suitable for Agile methods if Agile methods are most suitable when the requirements are likely to change frequently during the project duration. A team could not agree whether the stories in a sprint were complete or not. When can the team decide that the stories are completed successfully? Each scrum team should have a documented and agreed-upon definition of done. Basis this, the team should determine completeness of the stories and sprints. A scrum master is new to the role. Which of the following is aligned with this role? Scrum masters should help teams when product owners act too pushy and demanding. Which of the following extreme programming techniques helps the most in knowledge sharing across the team? Pair programming involves two people working on the same task. This helps knowledge sharing across the team. A project involves a lot of uncertainty. How should this be handled in timeboxed projects where there is a firm commitment on deadlines? Features buffer means that low-priority features can be removed from scope if the team runs out of time. Use of information radiators is important for Agile projects. Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a good information radiator? Information radiators should not be fixed. They should focus on a specific problem and be refreshed with new set of targets. Jeff wanted the team to start using a new tool to improve the quality of their deliverables by automating some key processes. Where should Jeff bring this up for discussion? Sprint retrospective is an opportunity to discuss process improvement opportunities within the team. An Agile team received a number of suggestions on how to increase the value proposition of a product at a trade conference. How should these suggestions be reflected in the product backlog? Sprint retrospective is an opportunity to discuss process improvement opportunities within the team. The product backlog for a particular product contains too many stories. A product owner came across a product idea that is valuable but may not be worked on immediately. What should be done about this? The product owner may often add stories at the epic level for requirements that will be worked on in the future. In a burndown bar chart, the bottom of the bar in a particular sprint move downwards by 50 points. What does this indicate? The bottom of the bar moving downwards indicates that scope of the project was increased. A scrum master is new to an organization. She is unable to help the teams with a lot of the blocking issues. This means team members don't always get the help that they need. What should be done about this? The scrum master's primary responsibility is to help the team overcome obstacles. Scrum masters can be coached about how to grow into the role, but if they are unable to do so, they need to be replaced. A product owner wanted to know not just the overall project status but also epic- and story-level status. Which information radiator will help the product owner get this information? A parking lot chart reflects the status per epic and user story. The team completed 5 stories in a sprint of sizes 5, 2, 13, 8, and 1. Simultaneously they worked on stories worth 30 points which they partly completed but could not complete per the definition of done. What is the velocity of the team? Velocity considers the stories that are completed per the definition of done. Therefore, the velocity is the sum of the completed stories, which is 29 points. A team decided to try pair programming as a practice. One of the advantages of pair programming is that: Pair programming should lead to better quality due to online review. It may or may not lead to other benefits. A team's workload expanded, so they moved from one scrum team to over three scrum teams. The product owner is stressed because of the workload from all three teams. What is the best way forward? Typically one PO should support one team. More than that is likely to lead to more stress for the PO. An organization decided to use scrum. They knew that their existing system was broken, and they had heard good things about scrum from other organizations. Few months later, they got disillusioned with scrum and decided to abandon the experiment. Each team came up with a different way of defining scrum roles and duties. None of the teams had a full time scrum master or product owner. There was confusion and chaos. What could have been done to make the transition successful? Per the ADAPT framework, the organization does not seem to have spent time and energy in coaching the teams on scrum due to which they struggled. An Agile coach wants the organization transitioning to scrum to invest heavily in technical practices. Which of the following is a potential challenge in introducing technical practices early in an Agile transition? The team which already has a lot on its plate may push back or resist the adoption of these practices. But this challenge needs to be overcome, as technical practices give a very high RoI. An organization wonders if Agile would be a good fit for the work it does. Which of the following characteristics of the work will make it most suitable for use of Agile methods? The important advantage of Agile methods is that it helps you adapt to changes quickly, therefore the most suitable conditions for Agile is if the work is dynamic and changeable. A team felt during the retrospectives that they are not creating enough technical documentation which is hurting them. What should the scrum master do? Technical documentation is important. If the team feels the need for it, they should figure out a way to make it a part of the definition of done. A team feels that speed of working and flow of work are the fundamental goals rather than regular feedback. The best method for the team would be to use: Kanban focuses on speed of delivery by creating a proper workflow. The team suggested to the product owner that they should be improving the audit trial and error logging, as it will make it easier to maintain the product. The value proposition of the story is to enable: Ease of maintenance is most likely to lead to improvement in operational efficiency. A team regularly finds that it has to move work to the next sprint, as most of the user stories are partly done. Which of the following is the best way to address this? Splitting stories to smaller units may help the team complete them within the sprint rather than having to extend them to multiple sprints. A scrum team regularly finds that it has to rush toward the end of a three-week sprint and work overtime in the last week. How can the scrum master coach the team to avoid this? Regular tracking of progress might help the team prevent last-minute panic and rush in the sprints. A team wants to decide the sprint duration. The scrum master should tell them that although shorter sprints are better, longer sprints may be used if: If the overheads of iteration are high, the team may consider slightly longer sprints. If the team could not agree on the estimate for a story in the planning poker session, the scrum master should advice them to: An estimate is the best guess. Teams often stress themselves unnecessarily about the estimation process. An organization was using scrum for about a year. A new CEO joined the organization and asked them what advantages were derived from using scrum, as she was not fond of following the scrum method. The team felt that scrum was better but could not provide any supporting data for it. What should have been done to prevent this? It is a good practice to measure the outcomes expected from scrum. Five teams are part of a Nexus. They regularly realign their priorities. However, they often discover that they make wrong assumptions about what work and when the other teams will deliver. This issue causes the sprints to fail. Which of the following is the best way to address this? Dependencies among the teams participating in a Nexus must be identified early so that they can be planned ahead. A team which has a complex set of subsystems that needs to integrate for the product to work should focus majority of the energy into: Unit testing lies at the base of the test pyramid. If the units are not well tested, it is impossible to integrate them properly. An organization was using scrum for about a year. A new CEO joined the organization and asked them what advantages were derived from using scrum, as she was not fond of following the scrum method. The team felt that scrum was better but could not provide any supporting data for it. What should have been done to prevent this? It is a good practice to measure the outcomes expected from scrum. Which is the most appropriate forum to solve integration problems within a group of scrum teams that are coordinating to build a large product? Scrum-of-scrums is a mechanism to coordinate the work of multiple scrum teams and solve integration challenges. There are many skeptics in an organization that is transitioning to Agile. How should the organization deal with them? Skeptics are those who doubt the effectiveness of scrum. The best way to engage them is to give them more information and training about scrum. During the retrospective, quite a few team members said that too much work was being pushed by the product owner and they felt under pressure. What should the scrum master do? The scrum master needs to help the team push back sometimes against the product owner who might be too pushy about the work. A product owner wanted to track the progress of the team and scope changes on a project. Which of the following should the PO choose to use? The burndown bar chart tells you about the scope changes as well as the work completed by the team. Project A had an NPV of $10,000 and IRR of 12%. Project B had an NPV of -$5000 and IRR of 3%. Project C had an NPV of $15,000 and IRR of 8%. Project D has an NPV of $12,000 and IRR of 14%. Which project should be selected if the organization wants to think long-term? IRR represents the value added over a period of time, so if the organization has a long-term perspective, they should choose a project that has the highest IRR. A team wants to use scrum, but the organization does not have any scrum expertise. What is the best option to select the scrum master? It is OK to hire an external person as the scrum master, until the organization can coach and groom somebody to play the role. There was a project which had team members distributed across multiple locations. The team wanted to travel to one location for an in-person release planning meeting, for which a budget request was raised. Finance department was very hesitant to approve it. How can you convince the Finance department about the value of this proposal? An in-person meeting is likely to lead to better understanding and reduce the hidden costs of development. An organization wanted to bring in a number of improvements in the technical processes such as DevOps and configuration management early in the Agile transformation. You would say it would be better to bring the changes in stages rather than all in one go if: