Question 1

Product Vision

Accepted Answer

Product Vision is a high-level, aspirational statement that articulates the long-term direction and purpose of a product. It provides a clear and inspiring picture of what the product is meant to accomplish, who it is intended for, and benefits it provides to the customers.

A well-defined product vision helps build a shared understanding, align teams, and provide clarity on the desired outcomes for the product.

The importance of Product Vision lies in its ability to inspire, motivate, and guide the product team throughout the product development cycle. It serves as a North Star, helping to keep the team focused on what truly matters and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goals. It also helps to align stakeholders and customers around a shared vision for the product, which can improve communication, reduce conflicts, and increase the chances of success.

The Product Goal is a specific, relatively short-term, and measurable objective that helps the team make progress towards that vision. It guides the team to focus on delivering incremental value.

Examples of Product Vision:

The Amazon Kindle: "To provide customers with the best possible reading experience on a digital device." The Kindle's product vision is centered around delivering a superior reading experience that replicates the experience of reading a physical book as closely as possible, with features like a glare-free display, long battery life, and access to a vast library of e-books.
Google Maps: "To organize the world's geographic information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google Maps' product vision reflects its mission to provide users with accurate and detailed maps that help them navigate the world around them, with features like turn-by-turn directions, real-time traffic updates, and user-generated reviews.
Netflix: "To become the world's leading internet television network, offering a wide range of TV shows and movies to our members." Netflix's product vision centers around providing users with a vast library of high-quality streaming content that they can access anytime, anywhere, with features like personalized recommendations, ad-free viewing, and offline downloads.
Tesla Model S: "To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy by creating the safest, most compelling car ever produced." The Model S's product vision reflects Tesla's commitment to promoting clean energy and reducing carbon emissions, with features like a high-performance electric drivetrain, advanced safety features, and a sleek, futuristic design.

Question 2

Team Happiness Index

Accepted Answer

The Team Happiness Index is a measure of the overall satisfaction and well-being of the team members. It gauges their morale, engagement, and job satisfaction.

A high Team Happiness Index signifies that team members are satisfied with their roles, have a positive relationship with their colleagues, and feel supported by the organization.

A high Team Happiness Index can positively impact team's performance and creativity.

A low index might suggest potential issues that need attention to maintain team motivation and well-being.

Question 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

Developers

Accepted Answer

Developers are cross-functionally skilled people in the Scrum Team who contribute to develop a usable Increment each Sprint.

The Developers are accountable for:

Planning the Sprint work;
Execution and adapting their plan each day toward the Sprint Goal;
Creating a quality Increment that adhers to their Definition of Done;
Holding each other accountable as professionals.

Question 7

Blocker

Accepted Answer

Blocker is anything that blocks the team from making progress.

Please also see Impediment.

Question 8

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 9

Extreme Programming (XP)

Accepted Answer

Extreme Programming (XP) is a light weight framework intended to improve software quality, responsiveness to changing customer needs and achieve higher quality of life for the team.

Aligned with the Values and Principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, XP advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce regular checkpoints to adopt to the changing customer needs.

XP improves a software solutions in five essential ways:

Communication: XP favors simple designs, common metaphors, collaboration of users and programmers, frequent verbal communication, and feedback.
Simplicity: Simple system design with very simple code could be easily understood by most programmers in the team. XP starts with the simplest solution useful to the customers today. Extra functionality can then be added later.
Feedback: Short Feedback cycles from the System: ( by writing unit tests, or running periodic integration tests), Feedback from the Customer (Acceptance tests gets concrete feedback about the current state), and Feedback from the Team (team directly gives an estimation of the time that it will take to implement customer needs) help with communication and maintain simplicity.
Respect: Respect is a key value for programmers, which includes respect for others and self. Committing changes that break compilation, or delay the work of peers is not a sign of respect towards others. Members can show respect for their own work by striving for high quality and actively seeking feedback.
Courage: Courage enables developers to feel comfortable with designing solutions for what's important today and refactoring their code when necessary. Courage is to remove source code that is obsolete. Courage also means persistence to solve complex problem.

The original twelve practices are listed below:

The Planning Game
Small Releases
Metaphor
Simple Design
Testing
Refactoring
Pair Programming
Collective Ownership
Continuous Integration
40-hour week
On-site Customer
Coding Standard

Question 10

Toyota Production System

Accepted Answer

Toyota Production System (TPS) is a management system developed by Toyota that comprises its management philosophy and practices.

Toyota identifies TPS as a framework for conserving resources by eliminating waste. People who participate in the system learn to identify uses of material, effort and time that do not generate value for customers. It aims towards lasting gains in productivity and quality with a commitment to positive change".

Two conceptual pillars:

Just-in-Time: Building only what is needed, only when it is needed, and only in the amount that is needed.

Principles:

Continuous improvement
Respect for people
Long-term philosophy
Develop the right process
Develop your people and partners
Continuously solve root problems

Many of the Lean ideas and Agile Frameworks including Scrum are based on or inspired by TPS.

Question 11

Release Planning

Accepted Answer

Release Planning is the process of planning a product release, identifying the capabilities that need to be released, stakeholders and team members involved, budget and timelines.

In Scrum, every Sprint enables inspection and adaptation of progress toward a Product Goal. Every Sprint begins with Sprint Planning and results in at least one increment that is usable to customers.

Some teams release increments multiple times a sprint, other teams group features from more than a sprint before releasing to the customers.

Those releasing at least once a sprint, do not need seperate release planning besides the Sprint Planning that already exists.

Question 12

Velocity

Accepted Answer

Velocity is not a Scrum term, it is a term used in Extreme Programming.

Velocity is the rate at which value has been delivered.

It's calculated as an average of the value delivered by a team in the past few Sprints. [ Let's say average of last 4 or 5 Sprints ].

Let's say: The Team Acers delivered below number of Product Backlog Items:

Sprint Number of Product Backlog Items Delivered

At the end of Sprint 10, the velocity of team Acers is 6-7 Product Backlog Items per Sprint.

The velocity trending upward over a period may indicate that the team is delivering more output.

More velocity does not equal more value or more impact.

Also, velocity numbers can easily be gamed when velocity is used for micro-managing the team or pushing them to deliver more than what they could comfortably deliver.

Comparing Velocity of two teams is usually a waste of effort and futile. As two teams may have different set of work, complexity, skill set, collaboration, availability of Product Owner and many other variables would be different.

Question 13

Coaching

Accepted Answer

Coaching is a form of development intervention in which a coach, supports a learner or a coachee in achieving a specific personal or professional goal.

The coach provides a structure, accountability and space within which the coachee's wisdom emerges and capability grows to:

clarify a problem they like to solve/address,
identify possible solutions to try, and
take action to address the matter.

Providing answers, opinions, and telling others what to do is NOT coaching.

Unlike a mentor, a coach doesn't need to be an expert in the field in which a coachee aims to excel.

Product Vision

Team Happiness Index

One-Piece Flow

Cynefin

Continuous Integration

Developers

Blocker

Design Thinking

Extreme Programming (XP)

Toyota Production System

Release Planning

Velocity

Coaching

Continuous Delivery

Complex System

Estimation

Incremental Development

Evidence Based Management

Lean Waste

Scrum Events