Free Professional Agile Leadership Certification Exam PAL-I Exam Practice Test

What traditionally "good" behavior can impede the adoption of an agile culture? (choose the best answer)

• Encouraging specialization
• Rewarding outstanding individual performance
• Enforcing organization-level technology standards
• Rewarding high utilization
• Managing to: fixed-scope, schedule, and budget goals
• All the above

Scrum Teams are most effective when: (choose the best answer)

• They consist of team members who are shared across multiple initiatives at a time, since then they can take advantage of time otherwise spent waiting to do productive work.
• They consist of people who have mostly deeply specialized skills.
• They consist of team members who work only on one product and team at a time, so that they can focus.
• They consist of team members who have broad enough skills to do many kinds of work, but who are not deeply specialized in any one area.

You manage a product development organization and have several agile teams working on one product. How can you find out which team is performing the best? (choose the best answer)

• Comparing team performance often leads to unhealthy behaviors. Instead, focus on identifying and eliminating impediments that hinder team performance.
• The one with the highest velocity is performing the best.
• You need to normalize the estimates across the Scrum Teams and, based on that, create a balanced scorecard.
• You need to look at several trends of different measures such as velocity, defects, and technical debt to get a picture of how the team is performing.

Your organization wants to improve its Time-to-Market. Which of the following improvements would help best? (choose the best answer)

• Creating a centralized team to handle all product releases.
• Reducing the size of each release to deliver fewer features.
• Splitting the product into components that are developed in parallel.
• Establishing a common release schedule for all products.

What measure does NOT provide relevant or useful information about a team's ability to deliver value to the user/customer in the future? (choose the best answer)

• Story points delivered trends.
• User/customer satisfaction trends.
• Technical debt trends.
• Consistent achievement of Sprint Goals.

Who is responsible for managing the progress of work during a Sprint? (choose the best answer)

• The Scrum Master.
• The Product Owner.
• The Team Lead.
• The Project Manager.
• The Developers.
• All the above.

You are a manager responsible for a product being developed by a Scrum Team. A sales representative wants a particular feature in the product. They believe that it will help close a deal. The Product Owner understands the need but believes that there are more valuable things on the Product Backlog that will lead to more long-term business. The sales representative appeals to you to intervene. How do you respond? (choose the best answer)

• Ask the Product Owner to implement the feature anyway since it will close a deal.
• Reach out to Developers who you think may support your position, in the hope of gaining moresupport for the idea.
• Support the Product Owner’s decision to focus on broader market needs in the long run, even though it may mean loss of short-term business.
• Lobby other stakeholders to express support for adding the feature, to put more pressure on the Product Owner.

You manage a product development organization. You are looking at the progress reports from anumber of Scrum Teams in your organization, when you notice that while most teams have a velocity of 35-40 story points per Sprint, one team consistently delivers only 15-20 per Sprint. Is this cause for concern? (choose the best answer)

• Yes, this is cause for concern - the Scrum Master for this team is not making this team as productive as the others.
• No, this is not cause for concern - velocity is not a meaningful measurement of the value delivered by agile teams.
• Yes, this is cause for concern - the Product Owner for the team in question is not pushing the team hard enough.
• Yes, this is cause for concern - the team in question has not calibrated their story points with the rest of the teams.
• Yes, this is cause for concern - the team in question is performing worse than the rest.
• No, this is not cause for concern - the team in question will probably increase their velocity over time.

What is the primary benefit of an agile approach as compared to a traditional up-front approach? (choose the best answer)

• To maximize value.
• To utilize resources efficiently.
• To deliver on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.
• To minimize risks.

As a manager during your discussions with Developers, you observe that they do not feel connected to the work they are doing. They lack engagement and seem to be just going through the motions. What should you do? (choose the best answer)

• Create a bonus pool with a monthly award for the team member that contributes most to customer success.
• Implement a reward system based on customer satisfaction, in which a team's bonus is based on how much customer satisfaction improved.
• Help the team to create a shared and compelling vision for the product.
• Hold a team-building event with motivational speakers and group activities to try to boost the team's morale.