Domain#7 Continuous Improvement Mike Griffith

Process tailoring would be a good option for:

• A new team that has been formed by the merger of two other agile teams
• A team that is struggling to get their agile methods to work smoothly
• A team that is using agile successfully but would like to improve their methods
• A team that wants to start using agile methods

A series of project pre-mortems would be most useful on:

• A long-term, risky project
• A short project with a hard deadline
• A proposed project with well-defined technology and requirements
• A project that will require process tailoring

You hear that another team is using an agile-traditional hybrid approach. What is this most likely to involve?

• They are using agile methods to plan the project and traditional methods to track and measure performance.
• They are using agile methods for project accounting and traditional methods for the other elements of the project.
• They are using traditional methods to estimate the work and agile methods to plan the work.
• They are using agile methods to build the product and traditional methods for the procurement workflow.

In a retrospective, what technique could your team use to ensure that you really understand a problem you've identified?

• Five Whys
• Dot voting
• Kano analysis
• MoSCoW

If your total cycle time has remained the same but your value-added time has gone up, what does this mean?

• Your nonvalue-added time has increased.
• Your value-added time now equals your nonvalue-added time.
• The efficiency of your process has decreased.
• The efficiency of your process has improved.

The best way to improve the efficiency of a process is to:

• Do more detailed planning.
• Remove waste and bottlenecks.
• Minimize common cause variation.
• Add more stringent process controls.

Your team spends 10 minutes waiting for people to turn up for the daily stand-up meeting, which then lasts 15 minutes. The stand-up meeting is then followed by another 5 minutes of the team discussing the hockey game last night, and yet another 5 minutes brainstorming issues to solve. Calculate the total cycle time of this process, assuming that the hockey discussion is not categorized as a value-added activity.

• 15 minutes
• 20 minutes
• 30 minutes
• 35 minutes

When generating insights in a retrospective, we ask "why" five times to:

• Move beyond our automatic, habitual answers and get to the root cause of an issue.
• Get past the denial and resistance that tend to occur in the first three or four answers.
• Gather five levels of data around the issue.
• Avoid asking "why" six times, since that would be overkill.

Which of the following is a form of agile review?

• Sprints
• Customer demos
• Unit testing
• Project pre-mortems

In agile, the kaizen approach involves:

• Continuous, incremental improvements recommended by process experts
• Bold, top-down re-engineering initiatives
• Small, incremental improvements by the people who are doing the work
• Stopping the process as needed to implement essential improvements