Question 1

Framework

Accepted Answer

A framework could be a collection of guidelines, rules and elements that provide a structure and boundary but not the prescription to achieve something.

For Example: The game of Chess (a framework) offers:

The chess board (8x8 squares)
The chess pieces (Material)
The rules about how each piece is placed, how each piece moves across the board

A chess player gets to decide their strategy, which piece they move and where, how they secure their king and how they use their queen. The game of the Chess doesn't prescribe any of this.

Question 2

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 3

Cross-Functional Team

Accepted Answer

A Cross-Functional team comprises of people with all the needed functional skills needed to translate the work planned for a sprint in to a Done Increment without being dependent on people outside this team.

While experts at their primary skill, members of a cross-functional team may also develop competence at a secondary skill (not necessarily all the skills) to become more valuable for the team.

Also Refer: Scrum Team

Question 4

Value Stream Mapping

Accepted Answer

Value-stream mapping, is a powerful visual technique originating from Lean Management to determine the efficiency of a value stream.

The Value-stream map visualizes the flow of both materials and information as they progress through the process from Idea to Solution. It involves labelling and quantifing the activity time, and waiting (idle) time to calculate the effeciency of the value creation process.

Value flow efficiency of 5-10% is typical for a large number of manufacturing processes, product development in large organization, etc.

Mapping the time taken during the value creating activities and idle time between two activities, helps identify the process improvement areas in an organization.

Question 5

Scrum Values

Accepted Answer

Scrum Values offer overarching guiding-rails to how team members behave, act, work, and collaborate as a team.

Scrum offers five Scrum Values: Focus, Openness, Respect, Commitment and Courage.

When a Scrum Team and the people they work with embody these Scrum Values, they a build high trust environment.

Question 6

True Leader

Accepted Answer

Scrum Masters are true leaders who serve the Scrum Team and the larger organization. - Scrum Guide.

A True Leader may exhibit characteristics such as:

Leads by Example: Scrum Master not only invites the team members to regularly seek feedback and try to continuously improve, however, models exhibiting the same and seeks feedback about their own performance and strives to keep improving how they serve the team, the product owner and the organization.
Supports those having difficult times: The Scrum Master stands in support of those who are having difficult times. Team members having difficult times don't need to be treated as bad people. The Scrum Master emphatizes and stands in support of these people.
Leads by Serving: Not there to Manage, the Scrum Master serves to lead.

Also see: Scrum Master as a Servant-Leader

Question 7

Technical Debt

Accepted Answer

Technical debt is the incomplete work that must be addressed to bring the product to the expected quality and functionality.

Technical Debt could be intentional as well as unintentional.

Intentional Tech Debt is a result of decisions made during product development that emphasize speed over the product quality.

When developers are rushed, they may cut corners and pay less attention to quality - the resulting product may have incomplete work / activities.

For example: lack of refactoring, not fixing known issues / defects, incomplete or ignored unit testing, etc.

Unintentional Tech Debt is a result of slopiness, lack of technical competence, bad design decisions, etc.

Having Technical Debt lowers the User Experience and also increase the cost of ownership.

Also see: Living Without Tech Debt

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

Lean Product Development

Accepted Answer

Lean product development a method for developing products that focuses on increasing visibility through small batches, shortening feedback loops, reducing waste, and continuous improvement. It results in speeding up delivery, reducing lead time and increasing customer value.

Some of the Principles of Lean product development are:

Eliminate waste.
Amplify Learning.
Build change capacity
Fast Feedback through rapid development
Empower the team
Build integrity in
See the whole

Also see: Lean Thinking, Lean Waste

Question 10

Product Goal

Accepted Answer

"The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against." - Scrum Guide 2020.

Crafted and Communicated by the Product Owner, the Product Goal is the long-term objective, a specific and measurable benefit or outcome a product should create.

The Scrum Team is focused on one product goal at a time. They must fulfill (or abandon) one product goal before taking on the next.

Question 11

Self-Management

Accepted Answer

When a team is empowered to decide who does what, when, and how - it can be termed as a Self-Managing Team. The self-managing team is responsible and accountable for all or most aspects / decisions of planning, producing and delivering value.

To enable people or teams in an organization to self-manage, the structure of the organization /and the team must be relatively flat. The team must be shielded from hierarchy. People must have the needed empowerement to make necessary decisions related to their work.

Some of the well known large-scale Organizations that are successfully operating and growing based on the principles of Self-Management:

Morning Star (Tomato Processor, USA)
Buurtzorg (Healthcare, The Netherlands, Worldwide)
Semco Group (Manufacturing, Brazil)
Patagonia (Outdoor Apparel, USA)
Haier Group (Consumer Durables, Appliances, China)

See also: Self-Managing Teams

Question 12

Impediment

Accepted Answer

An Impediment is anything that prevents a team from moving forward, and from getting work Done. Also knowns as a Blocker.

Impediments add delay and overprocessing (form of waste) to a team's work.

Impediments could be intra team, inter team and organizational.

Impediments can be effectively addressed when team members facing an impediments quickly announce it and create transparency about it.

Question 13

One-Piece Flow

Accepted Answer

One-piece flow is a lean (manufacturing) practice, in which customers receive a valuable product that is produced from start to finish, per the customer's needs. Such a process limits work-in-progress, eliminates waste, excess processing, and over-production, which increases efficiency and lowers costs.

Due to reduced work in progress, the flow of the value increases, overhead costs go down, the inventory carrying costs signifiacntly reduces, the throughput increases.

Question 14

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 15

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 16

PDCA

Accepted Answer

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is an iterative problem solving framework developed around 1950s by Edward Deming.

PDCA is used to improve processes, products, and services, by improving upon quality, reliability, productivity, and effectiveness. PDCA is an improvement cycle, and is also known as dynamic improvement.

Plan: Involves gathering data, defining the issue, and identifying potential solutions.

The PDCA cycle is repeated until the desired improvement is achieved.

Question 17

Daily Scrum

Accepted Answer

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. During the Daily Scrum, the developers inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.

It is held at the same time every working day of the Sprint.

Daily Scrums improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings.

The Scrum Master and the Product Owner are not required (participants) at the Daily Scrum. While they can observe, they do not interrupt or interfere.

Question 18

Systems Thinking

Accepted Answer

Systems thinking is an approach to solving complex problems that seeks to understand the system as a whole, recognizing patterns and considering connections.

Systems thinking recognizes that complex systems are made up of not just parts, but also of interactions and rules. These rules are important decisions that guide the behavior of the system.

Systems thinking also recognizes relationships between parts and that relationships between parts influence each other.

A systems thinking approach focuses on a system’s properties, such as its relationship to other elements in the system, and the relationships among these elements and behavior of the system as a whole.

An excellent reference on Systems Thinking is the book 'The Fifth Discipline' by Peter Senge. In it, Peter describes 11 laws:

Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions.’
The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
Behavior will grow worse before it grows better.
The easy way out usually leads back in.
The cure can be worse than the disease.
Faster is slower.
Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
Small changes can produce big results…but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
You can have your cake and eat it too—but not all at once.
Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
There is no blame.

Developing Systems Thinking improves the ability of leaders, coaches, Product Owners and Scrum Masters to holistically solve the problems at hand, rather than solving the symptoms.

Question 19

Spotify Engineering Culture

Accepted Answer

How Spotify (a music streaming company) built their engineering culture based on agile values, principles and techniques:

Part I:

Part II:

This video reflects Spotify's journey in progress, not the journey completed. Many teams blindly try to follow Spotify model and miserably fail at it, as the underlying context for every organization / team is different.

Question 20

Blocker

Accepted Answer

Blocker is anything that blocks the team from making progress.

Please also see Impediment.