Question 1

A3 Problem Solving

Accepted Answer

A3 problem-solving is a structured approach to problem solving. A3 problem-solving involves finding the root cause of a problem, developing a plan of action, and ensuring the plan is actioned.

Presented on a A3 size paper, the A3 process promotes simple structure, logical thinking, effective collaboration, and active communication. A3 thinking promotes a responsibility focused conversation about What is the right thing to do.

A3 Template / Report may have below areas:

Background
Current conditions
Goals/Targets
Analysis
Proposed Countermeasures
Plan
Follow Up

The aim with A3 is to not fix the symption, but to go to the root-cause of the problems and eliminate the problem efficiently in a way that's strategically aligned with the organizational goals.

Question 2

Acceptance Criteria

Accepted Answer

Acceptance criteria (AC) is the set of criteria that define / limit the functional scope of a Product Backlog Item. It guides how a particular feature may be used from an end user’s perspective. If the implementation of a functionality meets the Acceptance Criteria the Product Backlog Item (PBI) or a User Story would be accepted by the user, the customer, or the Product Owner.

Acceptance critieria for each PBI would be different and unique as it relates to the functional scope of that PBI.

Acceptance criteria is different from Definition of Done which focuses on Quality and Completeness. DoD is common across the PBIs and is consistent for the Product.

Refer for More: Tips to Write Effective Acceptance Criteria

Question 3

Antifragile

Accepted Answer

When exposed to volatility and shocks, Fragile things break, Robust things resist it, Antifragile things benefit from it.

Antifragile systems thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, risk and uncertainty instead of breaking under their pressure.

In his book Antifragile, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Nassim proposes rules for moving from the fragile toward the antifragile, through reduction of fragility or harnessing antifragility.

Antifragility (and fragility) can almost always be detected using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

Lessons to be antifragile:

Fragile items break under stress, antifragile items get better from it.
In order for a system to be antifragile, most of its parts must be fragile.
Antifragile systems work, because they build extra capacity when put under stress.

Question 4

Beyond Budgeting

Accepted Answer

Beyond Budgeting is a management philosophy that replaces traditional, rigid annual budgeting with flexible, adaptive, and decentralized processes. Key principles include:

Customer Focus: Aligning all processes and decisions with delivering customer value.
Decentralization: Empowering frontline teams to make decisions.
Adaptive Processes: Using fluid planning and forecasting to quickly respond to market changes.
Performance Evaluation: Shifting from fixed targets to relative performance metrics.
Dynamic Resource Allocation: Allocating resources based on current needs and strategic priorities, rather than fixed annual budgets.
Transparency and Trust: Promoting open information sharing and decision-making trust.

This approach aims to enhance organizational agility, employee engagement, and overall performance in dynamic business environments.

Question 5

Business Agility

Accepted Answer

Business agility is the capability to quickly change or adapt to changes in a business. Building Business Agility is an ongoing process and not a one-time event. Business agility can also be referred to as organizational agility, or adaptive business.

Business agility is the ability of a company to adjust to changes quickly. In business, agility involves the ability to change one’s strategy, operational model, and operating processes in response to internal and external changes.

This changes can be external, such as changing market conditions or government regulations. Internal changes can also have a big impact on business agility, such as disrupting the company culture or stakeholder loyalties, swiftly reacting to customer demands and quickly launching new products.

Organizations that have a high level of business agility will be better suited to take advantage of emerging opportunities, that will allow them to grow and overcome competition.

Question 6

Collective Ownership

Accepted Answer

The practice of Collective Ownership of a Product / Code / Solution means the entire team collectively owns building of the solution / product and that every member has a responsibility to contribute to it.

It taps in to collective intelligence of the team members and reduces risk.

In Scrum the developers have collective ownership of the product being built.

Question 7

Continuous Delivery

Accepted Answer

Continuous Delivery is the practice of delivering small changes to software quickly, frequently and continually.

With a Continuous Delivery system, software builds are checked regularly using automated tests for quality and deployed to test and then to production environments as soon as they pass. Due to automation it is often possible to release multiple changes to the software per day.

This approach often accelerates software release cycles and minimizes the amount of time between when code is developed and released, shortening feedback cycle and improving adaptability.

Question 8

Continuous Deployment

Accepted Answer

The continuous deployment strategy involves automatically releasing every code change (commit) into the production environment after it is (automatically) built, integrated and has passed the automated testing. This makes changes immediately visible to the software's users.

Continuous deployment can help reduce the risk of errors in live software by eliminating the need for manual approval of code changes.

To be effective, continuous deployment must be used in conjunction with other production-ready development practices. Practices such as rigorous automated testing and real-time monitoring of production environment. This will allow any issues with new releases to be detected quickly and efficiently.

The need for continuous delivery can be traced back to the first principle of the Agile Manifesto (origin Feb, 2001):

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Also see: Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration

Question 9

Continuous Integration

Accepted Answer

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers integrate their work frequently during the day and automatically, rather than waiting for the end of every development cycle.

Continuous integration is a continuous, automated, and integrated software build and test cycle that merges source code from participating programmers to produce an executable that is ready to be tested.

Question 10

Conway's Law

Accepted Answer

“Organizations who design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structure of these organizations.” Melvin Conway

Meaning, the organizational silos and departmental boundaries will eventually reflect in the design of the product / system they build.

To avoid such results, organizations must rethink on the structures and communications in place.

One solution to that challenge is to create Feature Teams.

Please refer: Feature Teams

Question 11

Cost of Delay

Accepted Answer

Cost of Delay (COD) is a decision making / prioritization framework that helps a Product Owner quantify the economic value impact of building a feature or completing an initiative sooner as opposed to later.

The cost of delay is an efficient decision-making tool that can completely transform the mindset of an organization and resulting ROI. It does so by putting a value lens over the conversation of costs and deadlines, offering full-scenario visualizations of what the most critical tasks really are.

Question 12

Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)

Accepted Answer

A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is a graph to visualize the flow of value through a system. A CFD is a valuable tool to Inspect - visually, the value delivered, work in progress and the amount of work in the backlog.

The X-axis represents Time / Timeline.

The Y-axis could represent multiple variables simultanously such as - Number of Work Items Completed, Work-In-Progress and the amount of work in the backlog.

These different variables are represented using different colors in a graph that either goes up or stays stable throughout the duration for which the graph is plotted.

It helps to visually 'inspect' inconsistencies in the workflow / process, built up of work in the backlog, and to help adapt processes.

The CFD helps identify the:

Cycle time
Throughput and
Work in Progress.

The CFD may also be used as a complimentary practice for Scrum Teams to reveal their planning, execution and value delivery cadence.

Also see: Burn Down Chart, Burn Up Chart

Question 13

Customer Persona

Accepted Answer

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal prospect (or customer) based on market research and actual data about your present customers. It includes demographic data, behavior patterns, motivations, life-style, behaviors, pain points and objectives.

Customer personas are used to segment your customers into groups, identify their different needs, and tailor your product features or service to each group.

Organizations create customer personas for their product / business to make their offering relevant to their customer needs.

Question 14

Cycle Time

Accepted Answer

Cycle Time in Scrum refers to the time it takes for a Product Backlog Item or a task to be completed from the moment work starts on it until it's considered done. It provides valuable insights into the Scrum team's efficiency in delivering work items. A shorter cycle time generally indicates better efficiency and faster delivery.

A shorter cycle time means the team is working more swiftly and getting things done quickly, while a longer cycle time might indicate potential bottlenecks or areas for improvement.

Slicing the PBIs thinner usually helps keep the Cycle Time low. If your team is consistently able to sliced the PBIs to a point where most PBIs can be completed within a day, in such cases there would be usually no benefit of measuring Cycle Time.

Question 15

Cynefin

Accepted Answer

The Cynefin Framework is a decision making framework, that recognizes the casual differences between systems and proposes new approaches to decision making in complex environemtn.

Cynefin is a sense-making model not a categorization model.

If the question is How do we make sense of the world, so we can act in it.

In nature, there are 3 basic systems: Ordered Systems, Choatic Systems and Complicated Systems. Once people know in which domain / system they are in, they can choose the domain specific response.

Question 16

Defect Density

Accepted Answer

Defect Density is a metric used to assess the quality of the software produced by the team. It represents the number of defects or bugs discovered in the product relative to its size or complexity.

Defect Density = Number of Defects / 1000 Lines of Code (KLOC)

A lower defect density indicates better development practices resulting in the team delivering higher software quality and better user experience.

Defect Density acts as a risk indicator for the software. A higher density suggests that the product might be more prone to errors, adding new features would become more difficult, transparency would reduce and could lead to user dissatisfaction.

In Manufacturing industry, the Defect Density is calculated as the number of defective units of a product produced against the total number of units manufactured.

Question 17

Design Thinking

Accepted Answer

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to solving complex problems. Design Thinking consists of five key steps to creating better solutions:

Emphathize: Understand needs of the end user
Define: Define end user / customer persona(s)
Ideate: Brainstorm ideas, narrow down possible solutions
Prototype: A visual-interactive mock-up of an idea, created to test an early stage idea, and gather user's feedback.
Test: Invite feedback, insights and analyze the effectiveness of the chosen prototype.

Question 18

Estimation

Accepted Answer

Estimation in product development is used to guess how much work can be completed and by when.

Various estimation techniques such as: Story Points, Planning Poker, T-Shirt Sizes, etc.. allow a team to relatively size the effort required to complete an item.

Estimation involves assumptions of the impact of various variables to complete an item such as:

Effort needed by the team (various functional experts) to complete an item
Complexity of the task
Unkonwns involved
and so on.....

While, Estimation may help to create a shared understanding about the work at hand among the developers, Product Owner and stakholders (optional), it usually takes away disproportional amount of time which is a big waste.

Assumptions based approaches are weak ideas at their best.

A much better and effective approach to forward looking decision making in complex environment is decision making based on Empiricism.

See also: Empiricism

Question 19

Evidence Based Management

Accepted Answer

Evidence-based Management refers to a decision-making approach that relies on objective and verifiable evidence, data, and research to inform and guide managerial actions and choices within an organization.

By using rigorous analysis and empirical evidence, this approach seeks to minimize biases and subjectivity, leading to more informed and effective decision-making.

It emphasizes the integration of scientific findings and real-world factual data to optimize organizational processes, enhance performance, and achieve desired outcomes.

Also see: Empiricism

Question 20

Feature Teams

Accepted Answer

A feature team, is a cross-functional, cross-component team dedicated to building end-to-end customer features one by one.

A feature team usually consists of members from all areas of a system, such as: business, development, operations, product, and technology.

Building a feature team requires that team members are empowered to work on all the components of the system that avoids depending on other teams. This speeds up the development work and avoids waiting, delays and hand-offs significantly increasing the value throughput.

Feature teams will benefit from having Full stack engineers / generalizing specialists in the team. However, it's not expected that every team member knows every skill.

https://malcolm-en-gb.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/instances/iBXIwUgCog/resources/5nVvAvL5Oj/Feature%20Teams.png (Feature Teams)

Source: Feature Teams Primer by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

Question 21

Information Radiators

Accepted Answer

Any tools / means that radiate out the information by making it visible and transparent to other team members, stakeholders and relevant parties. Usually Big Visible Charts, Large Displays, WhiteBoards, etc. may be used to make information visible.

Information such as: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Defects Open, Impediments, Status of Build etc. may be made available through information radiators so that the team members can regularly inspect and adapt as needed.

Question 22

Kaizen

Accepted Answer

Kaizen is a Japanese terms referring to incrementally achieving excellence through the relentless and endless pursuit of perfection.

In a business context Kaizen is continuous improvement of processes, operations and functions involving all employees.

Kaizen is Change for the Better.

Also see: Lean Thinking, Lean Waste, A3 Problem Solving, Lean Product Development, Value Stream Mapping.

Question 23

Kanban

Accepted Answer

Kanban is a lean method, a framework to visualize work and improve the flow of value through the system.

Initiated by Toyota as part of the Toyota Production System, Kanban (in Japanese) is a visual card used as a scheduling system, showcasing the essential information and progress of the work through the product development system.

Following four essential practices help optimize the flow of value:

Visualize the workflow
Limit work in progress
Manage flow
Make process policies explicit

Through pull based movement of the work, Kanban helps achieve evolutionary improvements in process and product.

Question 24

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Accepted Answer

A performance indicator is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific strategic objective.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are performance indicators most critical to an organization.

KPIs provide goals for teams to work towards, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help employees across the organization make effective decisions. From sales and marketing to finance and HR, KPIs help every area of the business move forward at the strategic and operational level.

Question 25

Lead Time

Accepted Answer

Lead Time is the time it takes from identifying a need (could be a customer problem, feature request, defect raised, technical enhancement etc.) to making a solution available to customers.

Having a shorter the lead time equates to more responsiveness.

To reduce the lead time in Scrum:

A Self-Managing and Cross-Functional Scrum Team further improves the ability to improve the rate of value delivery hence a shorter Lead Time.