What does Business Agility mean?
Describe the Business Agility Value Stream.
Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions.
What are the seven core competencies of Business Agility?
What are the benefits of SAFe?
Lean Portfolio Management talks about
1. Strategy investment and funding
2. Architectural runway
3. Defining the Agile release trains
4. Feature ordering
To compete in age of software we need to
1. think only about speed of innovation
2. discard hierarchy completely
3. Balance the stability of hierarchy and Speed of innovation via Network
4. Think only about the newer technologies
—> Network way of working provides speeed of innocation while hierarchy ensures stability and efficiency to succeed we need both
Which one of the below is NOT a part pf The Seven Core Competencies of Business Agility
1. Generative culture
2. Continuous Learning culture
3. Organizational Agility
4. Enterprise Solution Delivery
As per SAFe who should be center of your product strategy
1. budget
2. Skills available
3. Customer
4. Vision
—> Comptency of Agile Product Management indicates that Customer Centricity should drive our product strategy
Lean agile leadership does not need
1. Autocratic dictatorial ways of working
2. Leading by example
3. working on mindset and culture
4. Leading the change
What is business Agility
1. Establishing well developed CICD pipeline
2. ability to compete and thrive in the digital age
3. Capturing requirements in User story form rather than Req Specs
4. Ability To release code to production every two weeks
—> Business Agility helps us to respond quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative,digitally-enabled business solutions
High performing cross functional agile teams strive for
1. Independent focus on operations and development teams
2. Maximizing the story points
3. Release in production every two weeks
4. Built in Quality
—> Comptency of Technical Agility highlights that each Agile Team drives Quality
Which one of the below is NOT a benefit from SAFe
1. Improved parallel processing skills
2. Increased productivity
3. Better time to market
4. happier employees
Which of the follwing SAFe configurations shows business agility?
1. Large Solution
2. Portfolio
3. Huge Program
4. Essential
—> Business Agility is Indicated by the Green Strip at the top of SAFe Big Picture
SAFe has 4 configurations – which configuration acts as the basic building block?
1. solution
3. Full
SAFe 6 for Lean Enterprises is a ——————-
1. Operating System for business agility
2. Prescribed Methodology
3. Lightweight framework
4. Part of Agile manifesto
In terms of Technology revolutions which period indicates beginning of a new wave?
1. Turning Point is Existing businesses either master the new technology or decline and become relics of the last age
2. Installation Period is New technology and financial capital combine to create a Cambrian explosion of new market entrants, disrupting entire industries from the previous age
3. Deployment Period is Production capital of the new technological giants start to take over
4. Sunset period is This is the period where the technology becomes redundant
We are currently in which technological revolution?
1. Brass age
2. Iron Smythy
3. Software and digital
4. Farming
What does Lean Thinking mean? What are the Principles?
What are the Agile Values (Agile Manifesto)?
What does it mean to “Optimize the full Value Stream”?
Most problems with your process will surface as delays
Most of the time spent getting to market is a result of these delays
Reducing delays is the fastest way to reduce time-to-market
Focus on the delays
What are the four core values for SAFe?
What are the SAFe Lean-Agile principles?
#1 Take an economic view
Deliver early and often
Apply an economic framework:
Development expense – the cost of labor and materials required to implement a capability
Lead time – the time needed to implement the capability (described as ‘Cycle time’ in Reinertsen’s work)
Product cost – the manufacturing cost (of goods sold) and deployment and operational costs
Value – the economic worth of the capability to the business and the customer
Risk – the uncertainty of the solution’s technical or business success
#2 Apply systems thinking
Systems thinking takes a holistic approach to solution development, incorporating all aspects of a system and its environment into the system’s design, development, deployment, and maintenance.
Three aspects of system thinking:
#3 Assume variability; preserve options
You cannot possibly know everything at the start
Requirements must be flexible to make economic design choices
Designs must be flexible to support changing requirements
Preservation of options improves economic results
The goal is to manage variability, and preserve options, providing the controls and flexibility teams need to build great solutions.
Apply a set-based approach:
#4 Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
Fast feedback accelarates knowledge.
PDCA - Plan Do Check Adjust
Integration points accelerate learning
Development can proceed no faster than the slowest learning loop
#5 Build milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
The problem of phase-gate Milestones:
They force design decisions too early, this encourages false feasibility
They assume a “point” Solution exists and can be built correctly the first time
They create huge batches and long queues, and they centralize requirements and design in program management
Apply objective Milestones: Planning Interval (PI) System Demos are orchestrated to deliver objective progress, product and process Metrics
#6 Make value flow without interruptions
The eight flow accelarators: Visualize and limit WIP, adress bottlenecks, minimize handoffs and dependencies, get faster feedback, work in smaller batches, reduce queue length, optimize time “in the zone”, remediate legacy practices and policies
Reduce batch size for higher predictability. Reducing batch size:
Increases predictability
Accelerates feedback
Reduces rework
Lowers cost
Optimal batch size is an example of a U-curve optimization:
Long queues are bad queues: Long queues create longer lead times, increased risk, more variability, lower quality, less motivation
#7 Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
Cadence is a rhythmic pattern of events that provides the steady heartbeat of the development process. It makes routine everything that can be routine, so developers can focus on managing the variable part of solution development.
Synchronization allows multiple solution perspectives to be understood, resolved, and integrated at the same time.
The combination of cadence and synchronization helps Agile teams proceed confidently despite the inherent uncertainty.
#8 Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
► Workers themselves are most qualified to make
decisions about how to perform their work
► The workers must be heard and respected for management to lead effectively
► Knowledge workers must manage themselves and require autonomy
► Continuing innovation must be part of the work, the tasks, and the responsibilities of knowledge workers
Unlocking intrinsic motivation with autonomy, mastery, and purpose
► Autonomy is the desire to be self-directed and have control over what we work on, how we do our work, and who we work with
► Mastery is the urge to get better at what we do and improve our personal and team skills
► Purpose is the desire to do something that matters and has meaning
#9 Decentralize decision-making
Excessive centralization of decisions creates queues and bottlenecks and causes delays
Since solution development requires multiple decisions to be made on an ongoing basis, this centralized approach ultimately impairs business agility throughout the entire organization.
—> Decentralized Decision-Making Accelerates Flow
#10 Organize around value
Management challenge: Connect the silos
Instead, organize around development Value Streams
Value flows across organizational boundaries
Agile Release Trains realisieren Entwicklungswertströme
Cross-functional Agile Teams
Agile Teams are cross-functional, self-organizing entities that can define, build, test, and—where applicable—deploy increments of value. Agile teams are cross-functional, long-lived, and organized to deliver value as easily as possible.
Optimized for communication and delivery of value
Typically include 10 team members or less
Contain two specialty roles:
Scrum Master/Team Coach – Product Owner
Built-in Quality
Built-In Quality is a set of practices to help ensure that the outputs of Agile teams in business and technology domains meet appropriate quality standards throughout the process of creating customer value.
► Shift learning left – Reveal problems sooner, take corrective action with minimum impact
► Pairing and peer review – Multiple viewpoints enhance work quality and grow knowledge
► Collective ownership and T-shaped skills – Reduce bottlenecks and increase flow
► Artifact standards and definition of done – Ensure consistent quality for each work product
► Workflow automation – Enable small batches and reduce errors
Organizing Agile Release Trains around the flow of value
—> The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams that incrementally develops, delivers, and often operates one or more solutions in a value stream.
► A virtual organization of 5–12 teams (50–125+ individuals)
► Synchronized on a common cadence—a PI
► Aligned to a common mission via a single ART Backlog
Which one of below is NOT an andvantage of reduced batch size
1. Less rework
2. Less defects
3. Better ability to adopt to market changes
4. Improved Predictability
Result of Phase driven milestone is
1. They encourage false positive feasibility indicators
2. Shorter queue
3. They make changes easier
4. They reduce risk
—> Often in waterfall world, the earlier phase gates like requirements or design often make teams to freeze the requirements design very early. While this gives temporary confidence to teams – it is a false confidence
Development occurs in an uncertain world -In order to cater to this uncertain world
1. Ensure that both requirements and design are kept flexible till last minute
2. break down the features in user stories for the team backlog
3. Get a sign off on requirements by all involved stakeholders
4. Only onboard skilled knowledge workers
—> Since the requirements change often, we need to keep our solution flexible so that we can accommodate the changes as easily as possible
Reduced Batch size helps to increase predictability
1. False
2. It depends on context
3. These two statements are not connected
4. True
—> Reduced batch size allows us to predict timelines better, also it helps to get a quicker feedback thus reducing risk and increasing predictability
Development effort should be organized around
1. Operational Value Streams
2. Reporting hierarchy
3. Locations - we should prefer single location team
4. Development Value streams
Lean thinking focusses on
1. Minimizing the team size
2. Avoid changes and disruptions
3. keeping the budgets lean and limited
4. Making Value flow without interruptions
SAFe principles help the leaders to
1. Create requirement hierarchy
2. Ensure that SAFe transformation is happening in ethical way
3. Shut down any resistance
4. understand why the practices work and if they do not work - how to change them
—> While problems of our customers are unique , the elements that help to solve those are common. The principles describe these elements
System Thinking says
1. For the system to behave well as a system, a higher-level understanding of behavior and architecture is required
2. Knowledge workers seek Purpose
3. Customer Centric Products succeed faster
4. ROAMing the risk is a sytemic solution
Which one are better?
1. Point driven milestones
2. signed off milestones
3. objective milestones based on working software
4. Phase gate milestones
—> When we measure the progress in terms of working products, we get information about real progress and do not get surprises later on
Which one of the below represents transactional cost
1. Cost of installing your code in production
2. Impact of Delayed Revenue
3. Rework because of late feedback
4. Impact of Delayed Increase in satisfaction
—> Transaction cost is the cost incurred to prepare install validate a batch.
Littles law suggests that wait time can be reduced by shortening the queue length. We can shorten the queue length by
1. decreasing the amount of work we do
2. signing off all the requirements
3. Centralize all decisions
4. Focsusing on small batches
One disadvantage of siloed team is
1. shorter queue length
2. More manual work
3. Reduced quality
4. additional hand off effort
—> Siloed teams are the teams which are focused around a specific function rather than end to end value – such teams increase the handoff efforts
Agile economics dictate
1. Release every 2 weeks
2. centralize all decisions
3. Deliver early and often
4. Ignore queue length
—> Agile economics focus early and ongoing incremental delivery
what is the primary measure of progress?
1. working software
2. Phase gate sign off
3. Zero defect delivery
4. Contractual agreements
—> Agile Manifesto – 7th principle
What can help the teams to get ready for practicing decentralized decision-making
1. Remove hirarchy within organization
2. Management Leadership should Provide clarity on organizational objectives, coach effective problem-solving, and provide opportunities to exercise and cultivate decision-making abilities.
3. Create good customer centicity
4. Improve cross functionality
—> If the teams are aware about organizational goals and have opportunities to take decisions, they will be able to take decisions independently
what is true about integration Points
1. They increase queue length
2. They help to reduce the transaction cost
3. They delay learning
—> Integration points allow feedback on the entire system. That increases the learning and reduces risk
SAFe helps to enable cadance as well as synchromization by
1. Breaking requirements vertically
2. having cross functional teams
3. Training scrum masters
4. having 2 week iterations and all teams in an ART start their iterations on same day
Which of the below events help to show case objective milestone for the PI
1. PI system Demo
2. Problem solving workshop
3. PI planning
4. Iteration demo
—> PI system demos will help to show the demo of integrated working product across teams and this makes sure that we are able to measure progress in terms of real progress made
Hold precious what it is to be human, Value diversity of people and opinions , Grow people through coaching and mentoring , Embrace your customer is whoever consumes are part of Which SAFe Core Value?
1. Respect for people and culture
2. Program Execution
3. Transparency
4. Alignment
One advantage of cadence with short iteration duration is
1. reduced defects
2. Increased Velocity - team does more work per iteration
3. phase gates are eliminated
4. Makes waiting times for new work predictable
—> Short iteration length of 2 weeks means that teams have a possibility of accepting new more important work every 2 weeks
Decisions that are In-Frquent, Long lasting have significant impact should be
1. depends upon context
2. taken only after doing sufficient documentations
3. De centralized
4. Centralized
—> Decisions that are In-Frquent, Long lasting have significant impact should be centralized since such decisions often need wisdom and context of entire organization not only a single team
Decisions that need local context, come up frequently and are time critical should be
1. De centralized
2. Centralized
3. taken only after doing sufficient documentations
4. depends upon context
—> Decisions that need local context, come up frequently and are time critical should be should be de-centralized as these decisions can be taken more efficiently at team level
Which out of below is NOT a Core SAFe Value
1. Program Execution
2. Transparency
3. Respect for people and culture
—> Alignment,Transparency,Respect for people and culture and Relentless Improvement are the four SAFe Values
Who are the people most qualified most qualified tomake decisions about how to perform theirwork.
1. Direct supervisors
2. External auditors
3. Senior management
4. people who do the work them selves
Knowledge workers are the people who know more about their job than and aanybody else in the organization. This makes that they are the people who can make best decisions
Optimize time in the zone helps to
1. remove Silos
2. deliver Incrementally
3. Decentralize the decisions
4. Improve Flow
—> Optimize time in the zone :: Is one of the 8 flow accelarators
Scaled Agile Framework describes Lean thinking via
1. Lean Agile Mindset
2. SAFe Guardrails
3. SAFe Values
4. The Seven Core competencies
—> The Lean Agile Mind set is described by lean principles and Agile manifesto
which of below events support synchronization via cross domain planning
1. Iteration planning
2. Iteration retrospective
3. daily stand up
4. PI planning
—> entire ART and the stakeholders work together in PI planning and this allows different prespectives to synchronize
To find the optimal batch size, you need to
1. balance holding cost and reservation cost
2. focus on holding cost
3. focus on transaction cost
4. balance holding cost and transaction cost
—> Transaction costs change depending on batch sizes, and the more items included in a batch – the transaction costs will be lower . On the other hand, the more items in a batch, the holding costs will increase
which of below is true?
1. teams can have their own learning loops or iterations - they do not need to synchromize the learning loops
2. Development can proceed no faster than the slowest learning loop
3. Large batch size helps to shorten the learning loop
4. Shorter learning cycles mean slower the learning
—> iterations are learning loops – they allow us to quickly course correct – but if one team is having slower learning loop (longer iteration) it wull mean rest of ART will have to wait for them to synchronize and get feedback on integrated product
Communicating the vision, mission, and strategy to every person will help with which SAFe core Value
1. Transparency
2. Relentless Improvement
3. Alignment
4. Respect for people and culture
—> Communicating the vision, mission, and strategy to every person will help them see the big picture and increase alignment
In order to preserve options, which is a better approach
1. Set based
2. Phase based
3. milestone based
4. Point based
Set based
—> Set based design allows us to make decisions based on changing circumstances.
which is a value in Agile Manifesto
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Developing people over self growth
3. Working software over following a plan
4. comprehensive documentation over contract negotiation
What are the Roles on the Agile Release Train?
Who provides architectural guidance and technical enablement to the teams on the train.
1. System Team
2. System Architect Engineering
3. Solution Architect
4. Release Train engineer
—> System Architect Engineering providesarchitectural guidance and technicalenablement to the teams on the train
Who is responsible to order the stories in team backlog?
1. Epic Owner
2. Product Owner
3. Product Manager Mangament
4. Release Train Engineer
—> Product Owner helps with story prioratization or ordering
What from the list below is NOT a responsibility of Scrum master
1. Ensure that events take place for the team
2. Help with Impediment removal for the Agile team
3. Coach the Agile team
4. Prioritize the user stories
—> Scrum Master is the Coach and Facilitator for the team – story prioritization is done by PO
Which one of the below is the development practice required by building quality in
1. Cross Functionality
2. Self Organization
3. Synchronization via 2 week sprint
4. Collective ownership and standards
—> Establish flow Peer review and pairing Collective ownership and standards Automation Definition of done are some of the practices that help to build quality in. Many of the practices originate from XP
Agile teams believe in Built in Quality – one of the benefits of this is
1. helps to maintain high, sustainable development velocity
2. de centralize decisions
3. Quantify cost of delay
4. Increase queue length
—> Exploratory, early iterations, frequent system-levelintegration, design verification, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), and set-based design are some of the Quality practices for hardware teams
Who is responsible to develop and Commit to Team PI Objectives?
1. Product Owner
2. Release Train engineer
3. Product Manager
4. Agile Team
—> Agile team is self organized – the team as a whole decides and commits to Team level objectives
ART or the Agile Release Train is Organized around
1. Technology Horizontals
2. Functional Silos
3. Flow
4. location driven strategy
—> ARTs are organized around how the Value Flows- This ensures that delays and bottlenecks are reduced
Model-Based Systems Engineering is an example of
1. Built-in Quality practices for hardware teams
2. A code review tool
3. Value Stream analysis practice to optimize whole system
4. Model to implement customer cetntricity
Which one of the below describes Agile Release Train
1. It s a technology framework to automate entire continous delivery pipeline to ensure a release every 2 weeks
2. It s a technology framework to automate release deployment
3. Its A virtual organization of 5 to 12 teams, Synchronized on a common cadence, a Program Increment (PI) and aligned to a common mission via a single Program Backlog
4. It s a mandatorily Colocated organization of 5 to 12 teams, Synchronized on a common cadence, a Program Increment (PI) and aligned to a common mission via a single Program Backlog
Team visualizes and optimizes the flow of work using
1. Scrum
2. Kanban
3. XP
4. Lean
—> Visualizing and Optimizing the flow by managing WIP and reducing queue lengths is the key tenet of Kanban
Agile teams are optimized for communication and delivery of value
1. Not Mandatory
2. True
3. False
4. Depends upon the project manager
Agile Teams are cross-functional, self-organizing entities that can define, build,test, and where applicable, deploy increments of value.
SAFe Agile Teams leverage Scrum. Scrum based upon, Transparency Inspection Adaptation and ———-?
1. Fixed Requirements
2. Managing WIP
3. Short learning cycles
4. centralizing the decisions
—> Agile Teams follow scrum for the short learning cycles anabled by the 2 week iteration
With an ART or Agile Release Train, which type of teams is organized around the flow of work and hasthe ability to deliver value directly to the Customer or end user.
1. Stream Aligned
2. Cross Functional
3. User Experience
4. System Testing
What are the items that impact the cost of delay?
What are the benefits of PI planning?
Who joins in PI planning
1. Each team sends a few senior representatives
2. Members of entire Agile Release Train or ART along with the management
3. All the RTE Product Manager along with Scrum Masters and Product owners
4. All the Epic Owners
—> PI planning is a cadence driven planning event for the entire ART and as such all members of the ART join. Management team joins to give guidance
Purpose of ART Sync is to co-ordinate the progress OF PI. Who should join the PO sync
1. : PM, POs, other stakeholders, and SMEs RTE as necessary
2. Developers from all teams along with the PM and Pos
3. All the tech leads
4. RTE and all scrum masters
—> PO sync is meant to track progress adjust the scope and priority as needed – so we need the PMs and Pos. The RTE attends as needed along with any specific SMEs from technology or domain areas
Program Backlog is a holding area for
1. features
2. Stories
3. epics
4. capabilities
Team PI Objectives help to
1. Enable Scrum Master to track and control progress of their own team
2. Push the team for more work
3. Enable Product manager to track and control progress of each team
4. Create alignment for the team with over all PI objective and consequently aligns the team with the program vision
—> Objectives are business summaries ofwhat each team intends to deliver inthe upcoming PI. They often directly relate to intended Features in the backlog. As such they help to align the Agile team to broader vision of program
Architectural Runway i helps to
1. Measure the technical debt
2. Being able to deploy features faster
3. Clearly defind Business Objectives of PI
4. Improve transparency
—> Architectural Runway is existing code, hardware components, marketing branding guidelines, etc., that enable near-term business Features – It helps to
What out of below is a key Input to PI planning?
1. Portfolio Backlog
2. Last PI program backlog
3. Individual team salary structure
4. Program Backlog
Program backlog with the program
—> vision makes the key input to PI planning – Usually ~top 10 features are considered
User Personas is a tool that helps us to understand or define a users problem by
1. Getting user personnel to sign off functionalities
2. Following a standard template
3. Capturing rich and consise information without unnecessary clutter
4. Capturing detailed information with in depth specifications to ensure that we do not miss any piece of information
—> User Personas are very consise and capture rich information to convery the problems faced by users as well as their requirements
ART events create
1. Over head
2. Clarity for the RTE to manage the ART
3. Closed Loop System
4. Open Loop system
—> A closed loop system ensures on going co ordination and feedback management
ART predictability is measured in
1. Inspect and Adapt workshop
2. PI planning
3. System demo
4. ART Sync
—> The Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement in Inspect and Adapt workshop measures if the ART delivered the planned objectives and then the performance is tracked cross multiple Pis
Benefit hypothisis of a feature helps to
1. documents risks seen in the features
2. Justify why we want the feature implemented
3. documents assumptions behind the features
4. Decide which team will get credit once the feature is developed
—> Benefit hypothisis justifies development cost and provides business perspective for decision-making
Primary purpose of User Journey map is to help to
1. design the end-to-end Customer experience
2. Create User acceptance test cases
3. Identify target users who can conduct testing
4. reduce defects
—> Use journey maps to design the end-to-end Customer experience
Vision of a backlog
1. quantifies how to measure success
2. is an acceptance criterion for the feature
3. Explains the user benefits for feature
4. is a description of the future state of the product
—> Vision describes the future state or goal of the product and it helps to align everyone on the product s direction
Whenever a customer-centric Enterprise makes a decision,
1. it considers only the external revenue generating users as they are the customers
2. It ensures that decision is always decentralized
3. it fully considers the effect it will have on its end users
4. It creates a survey to get customer opinion on that decisions
—> Customer centricity involves putting customer in center – Any user who consumes our work(services or products) is our customer
Why customer centricity?
► Greater revenue
► Increased employee engagement
► More satisfied Customers
► Alignment to mission
► Better product resiliency and sustainability
Usually the teams Scrum Master and Product Owners are not working directly on the items – and Hence we should exclude their effort from the capacity while loading the work during PI
1. NA
2. NA
3. True
4. False
—> If the Scrum Master and Product Owners are not going to work on stories – adding them in capacity just creates un realistic expectations – In fact, we should consider any vacation time Days Off Part timer workers also
CALMR approach describes
1. How to work with knowledge workers
2. Agile Manifesto Values
3. SAFe Principles
4. DevOPS tenets
Culture Automation Lean Measure Recovery are the five Key tenets of DevOPs
PI planning retrospective helps to
1. Improve velocity over time
2. Track how the ART performed in last PI
3. Improve PI planning event over time
4. Find which team is commiting to do most of the work
—> The PI planning event will evolve over time. Ending with a retrospective will help continuously improve it
De coupling release elements from the total solutions help with
1. Continous work in progress
2. Continous deployment
3. Continous review
4. Continous exploration
—> Installs and deployments are easier when we can do so it small cpomponents
Which of the below statement about draft plan review is NOT True
1. Draft Plan review is the last stage of the PI planning
2. Usually Draft Plan review happens on Day 1 of PI planning
3. Entire ART is present during Draft Plan review
4. Draft plans review dependancies Challenges the draft PI objectivesas well as team loading for each
—> The draft plan often needs to be adjusted and is not last stage of the PI planning
Some of the possible adjustments that can happen to Plan after management review are
1. subtly encouraging teams to take up more work
2. Changes to scope of work done
3. Planning requirements reset
4. Reducing the size ofstories to accommodate the over all PI goal set by management
One common technique for ordering or prioratizing the backlog is Weighted shortest job first (WSJF). This way considers cost of delay for each item. What out of below is NOT an item that impacts the Cost of delay?
1. Risk Reduction Opportunity Enablement
2. Effort required
3. Time criticality
4. User Bsiness Value
—> User Bsiness Value, Time criticality, and Risk Reduction Opportunity Enablement are three components of cost of delay.
Which tools help to develop a deep shared understanding with customer?
1. getting the users to do beta testing
2. Empathy Map
3. User persona
4. User workflow
—> The empathy map is a tool that helps teams develop deep, shared understanding and empathy for the Customer
Which is best way to calculate velocity
1. Refer to the Program Contract for this piece of information
2. Push the team to increase its velocity constantly
3. Let the Product Owner set the acceptable velocity based on the urgency of work at hand
4. use the historical data by that team as guideline for each teams velocity
—> Historically what the team has been able to achieve is a good way to predict how much work the team can do realistically
One common technique for ordering or prioratizing the backlog is
1. Weighted shortest job first
2. Estimating Poker
3. Story Mapping
4. ROAMing
—> WSJF is a way to order the backlog – it considers cost of delay with the job size
Design Thinking is
1. A clear and continuous understanding of the target market, Customers, the problems they are facing, and the jobs to be done
2. A set of practices to design optimal solution
3. Way to design architectural runway
4. a framework to design value streams
—> design thinking helps to work in a customer centric way by systematically analyzing the problems faced by customer and ways to solve the problem
IP iteration helps with
1. time to complete the uncommitted objectives
2. Planning and Innovation
3. User acceptance testing
4. Sprint hardening
—> IP iteration is ear marked for Planning and innovation – It s a bad practice to schedule PI work in the IP iteration or use it as a buffer catch all
Uncommitted Objectives help to maintain Predictability
1. Because the give the team flexibility of not working on these objectives if the work extends for the work towards committed objectives
2. Because Business Owners do not assign business value to un committed objectives
3. Because we do not plan and estimate the work needed for uncommitted objectives - they are to be done in case we find team
4. Because they make it clear what the team is confident about and what the team is not Confident about
—> Uncommited objectives are those where the team is not confident. Teams usually plan early spikes for these
What out of below is a key Output from PI planning?
1. Team Kanban
2. Program Board
3. Portfolio Backlog
4. Program Kanban
—> Team and Program PI Objectives andProgram Board are the key outcomes from the PI planning events
Program Kanban helps to
1. Manage flow of the epics through various stages
2. Manage ffeature dependancies and their milestones
3. Manage flow of the stories through various stages
4. Manage flow of the features through various stages
—> Program Kanban tracks the flow of features
One of the key benefit of PI planning is
1. Freezing the scope of each iteration for next 3 months
2. Avoiding discussion between the teams during iterations
3. Establishing personal communication across all team members and stakeholders
4. Product Manager can approve the estimates in a single go for all teams
—> Entire Team joins the PI and Spends the 2 days together to align the goals – This also helps to foster better communication , identify key dependanches and provide just enough guidance with program context of UI Architecture Development practices etc
A program board helps to track
1. Team capacity
2. Features, dependancies and any key mile stones to monitor
3. How the stories progress towards completion
4. How the features progress towards completion
—> Program boards gives an over all picture of what each team is going to do in PI along with
SAFe works on Story Points Estimation. Story Points are
1. Relative in nature
2. Signed Off by the Product owner
3. are needed provide productivity standerdization across teams
4. directly related to hours of work needed
—> Story Point estimation is relative way of estimation. The whole Agile team is envolved in estimation – PO does not sign off.
During PI planning confidence vote is taken using
1. wide band deplhi
2. Roman voting
3. Dot voting
4. Fist of five
One common technique for relative estimation is
1. ROAMing
2. Story Mapping
3. Estimating Poker
4. Weighted shortest job first
—> Estimating Poker or Planning Poker is a technique for relative estimation with whole team. T shirt sizing is another technique used for relative estimation
Strategic Themes
1. Are defined by Epic owners
2. do not consider Portfolio context
3. Help to connect portfolio to enterprise and Drive the future state of a portfolio
4. Are generic statements that can not be measured
—> Strategic Themes are differentiating business objectives that Help to connect portfolio to enterprise and Drive the future state of a portfolio and provide context for lean budgeting
What is one input to enterprise strategy formulation?
1. Portfolio Canvas
2. Portfolio budgets
3. Strategic Themes
4. Financial drivers
What is a SAFe Portfolio?
1. A collection of Development Value Streams
2. A collection of Operational Value Streams
3. A collection of Agile Release Trains
4. A collection of large solutions
—> Operational value streams showcase how the business operates to generate value – These va;ue streams are implemented using the development value streams in a Portfolio
EPIC flow is governed using
2. Portfolio Canvas
3. Portfolio Kanban
4. Program backlog
1. Help to connect portfolio to enterprise and Drive the future state of a portfolio
2. Are defined by Epic owners
3. do not consider Portfolio context
Portfolio epics are
1. managed by the solution management
2. Cutting across PIs and Value streams
3. Limited to single iteration
4. Limited to single PI
—> Epics are large functionalities that cut across PIs and Value streams
Traditional project-based, cost-center budgeting
1. relies on funding the value stream
2. Creates overhead and friction
3. makes change management easy
4. Improves velocity
Funding Value streams rather than cost center
1. makes change management difficult
2. makes ordering backlog easier
3. Helps to reduce blame game and costly variance calculations
4. Creates overhead and friction
Leading indicators of an Epic describe
1. The early measures that will help predict the business outcomes
2. ROI to be exepected once we implement the epic
3. Business hypothiss for the epic
4. Supporting reasons to prioratize the epic high
—> Leading indicator describe the early measures that will help predict the business outcomes
If you have solution in Horizon 0, what will be your strategy for investment
1. Only invest what is required to sunset the solution
2. Absolutely no investments to be done
3. Its ok to invest but keepn an eye on ROI
4. Invest aggresively
—> Solution in Horizon 0 is ready for sunset or decommisioning. This means you should only invest Only what is required to sunset the solution
SWOT and TOWS help to
1. Break down functionalities
2. Order the program backlog
3. brainstorm potential future states of portfolio
4. Increase code quality
—> SWOT and TOWs are analysis techniques that are used in SAFe to brainstorm potential future states of portfolio
1. Program backlog
2. Portfolio Kanban
4. Portfolio Canvas
How does Strategy and investment funding help?
1. It ensures that money is spent only on revenue making ideas
2. It ensures that there are business hypothis created to justify the money Spent
3. It helps to gurantee the profits
4. It ensures that the entire portfolio is aligned and funded to create and maintain the Solutions needed to meet business targets
A quantified way to measure your progress in SAFe is
1. WSJF
2. measure and grow
3. Planning poker
4. ROAMING
—> Measure and Grow is the way each portfolio evaluates its progress toward Business Agility and determines its next
While implementing SAFe, you have Trained Executives, Managers, and Leaders – what should be next step
1. Conduct the SAFe Scrum Master training
2. Train the coaches
3. Start the first PI planning
4. Identify Value Streams and ARTs
—> SAFe implementation raodmap helps you to plan your SAFe transofmration in an organized manner:
you are following a 8 Step process to lead change for SAFe , you have formed your vision for the change, what should you do next
1. make econimic decisions
2. Create a sense of urgency
3. Build a guiding coalition
4. Enlist a volunteer army
SAFe Agile Leaders lead by example and
1. Help others grow
2. work more hours than their teams
3. Retain the decisions with themselves
4. Give ready made solutions to teams problems
8 Step process to lead change for SAFe starts with
1. Select Few + Diverse Many
4. Form a strategic vision
Which of the below is not the characteristics of SAFe leadership
1. Leading the change
2. Complete faith in Command and control way
3. having courage
4. Leading by example
In order to lead a successful change, you have developed the vision and strategy – what should be the next stage
1. Create a powerful guiding coalition
2. Establish a sense of urgency
3. Summarize the vision and strategy for senior management
4. Communicate the vision and strategy
One of the principles for change as per kotter is
2. Persue Perfection
3. welcome change even late in development cycle
4. Select many + Diverse Few
Last changeda year ago
