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Test Your Agile Knowledge

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Quiz


How's your agile knowledge? Try this short quiz and rate yourself.
  1. What's the recommended iteration size for an agile project?
    1. 2-4 weeks
    2. 1-8 weeks
    3. 4-12 weeks
    4. 4 weeks or under


  2. What are the three project roles in Scrum?

    1. Coach, Programmer, and Project Manager

    2. Developer, Scrum Master, Product Owner

    3. Product Owner, Project Manager, and Developer

    4. Scrum Master, Scum Lord, Scrum Owner

    5. Developer, Scrum Master, Project Manager



  3. How are Scrum and Agile related?

    1. Scrum tells us everything we need to know to run Agile projects

    2. Agile is just a looser form of Scrum

    3. You have to pick to do either Agile or Scrum. You can't do both

    4. Scrum is a project management framework that can be used for agile projects


  4. When are requirements completed in iterative projects?

    1. Once the product owner says so

    2. When the project is completed

    3. Once the code is written for the story

    4. They're never completed


  5. What's the tool we use in agile projects to understand and agree on what the system is supposed to do?

    1. Stand-ups

    2. Waterboarding

    3. Face-to-face conversations

    4. MS Word, or other document-writing tool

    5. The agile staff of compliance


  6. When does the Product Owner get to change the requirements?

    1. At any time the product owner can change the backlog, but only during iteration planning does the team size and buy stories for the next iteration

    2. He can add requirements at any time, but he cannot delete requirements unless it is part of a retrospective

    3. Only during a retrospective

    4. Once the requirements are written down, they cannot be changed until the next iteration

    5. Requirements are like the wind, when are they not changing?


  7. What's the purpose of an Agile Coach?

    1. To take all of your money

    2. To provide hands-on experience whenever you need so that you don't have to make so many mistakes

    3. To help you plan for how to change your organization to make it more agile

    4. Somebody to blame when the project goes south

    5. An expert in how perfect agile teams work and how to make your team perfectly agile


  8. What's the three questions in a stand-up?

    1. What was I working on?

    2. What am I going to be working on?

    3. Who needs to help me?

    4. Where am I?

    5. How much longer do I have?

    6. What are my obstacles?


  9. What's the best team size for an Agile project?

    1. More than you think

    2. 8-15 people

    3. Anything under 30 people

    4. 5-7 folks

    5. As few people dedicated at 100% as absolutely necessary and not a person more


  10. Can a CMMI shop, like the one that does Space Shuttle code, be Agile?

    1. No. Agile is about reducing paperwork, therefore paperwork-heavy, bureaucratic projects cannot be agile

    2. Yes. Agile is about minimizing overhead. Some projects may still require a lot of it

    3. It can be agile, but only if they also follow the best practices of Scrum

    4. Can I phone a friend?


  11. What's the famous sequence of numbers that some practitioners use to score stories?

    1. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

    2. The Fibonacci Sequence

    3. Archimedes' sequence(s) for p

    4. The closing sequence to the Titanic

    5. The Mean Square Root sequence


  12. If you change the definition of "done" to mean something less, just so you can get something completed, what are you incurring?

    1. The Wrath of Kahn

    2. Backlog resizing

    3. Technical debt

    4. Dependency injection, where work that depends on unfinished work creates a block

    5. Premature optimization


  13. How long has Agile/Iterative-Incremental Development been around?

    1. Since about 2000

    2. Since about 1990

    3. Since about 1980

    4. Since dinosaurs roamed the earth

    5. Since there have been complex projects to deliver


  14. Is it absolutely required that you have a single product owner for a team to be truly agile?

    1. Yes

    2. No


  15. Given these items, which one is the most important in an agile team?

    1. Delivering working code each iteration

    2. Collaborating cross-functionally

    3. Identifying a visible business owner who actively participates

    4. Being able to forecast when items in the backlog will be delivered

    5. The team owns their estimates and decides what work they can accept each iteration

    6. The team continuously identifies risks/issues and acts on them immediately


  16. Is Agile only for software projects?

    1. Yes

    2. No


  17. Stuff we need to make the system to in order for the Product Owner to be happy. We put that into a list called the what?

    1. Work queue

    2. Backlog

    3. Frontlog

    4. Issue list

    5. Story Board

    6. Bob


  18. What's the thing we do at the beginning of a project to 1) onboard the team, 2) create the initial backlog, and 3) have the business set up the project for success?

    1. Project Genesis

    2. Iteration Negative One

    3. The Great Beginning

    4. Inception

    5. We don't do that in Agile


  19. When is extending an iteration deadline okay?

    1. Only during holidays

    2. Never

    3. It can happen any time

    4. Only when mission-critical stories cannot be completed in the original sprint length


  20. Use Cases and User Stories are completely different things, right?

    1. Use Cases is an analysis technique, User Stories are placeholders for some kind of analysis conversation which might be use-case based, so no, they are not different

    2. Use-Cases are a lot of documentation. User Stories are much lighter. So yes, they are different

    3. User stories are about conversations. Use cases are about paperwork. So yes, they are different

    4. It depends on how you use them


  21. What's the best philosophy for an organization to us in implementing Agile?

    1. Stoicism

    2. Pragmatism

    3. Existentialism

    4. Epicurianism


  22. If you are a truly agile, high-performing team, that means that you're going to have very few meetings and hand-offs, right?

    1. Yes

    2. No


  23. True or False, items in the backlog are the requirements for an Agile project

    1. True

    2. False


  24. True or False, to be truly Agile, you should use points instead of hours for story estimation

    1. True

    2. False


  25. What's the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything?

    1. More beer

    2. Cats

    3. 42

    4. 56


  26. Bonus Question

  27. Do coaches have to mention the Agile Manifesto every time we talk about agile?

    1. No. The manifesto is just a marketing tool. It's a way of thinking, not a set of slogans

    2. Yes. It's an elaborate kick-back scheme

    3. Only if I am brainless

    4. What's that?








Answers
1.D 2.B 3.D 4.B 5.C 6.A 7.B 8.A, B, F 9.E 10.B 11.B 12.C 13.E 14.B 15.F 16.B 17.B 18.D 19.B 20. A or D 21.B 22.B 23.B 24.B 25.C 26. A

Explanations for tricky items coming in a future post




Scoring:


  • 23+ You are an Agile God

  • 20 - 23 You've got it

  • 17 - 20 You know enough to be dangerous. Danger Will Robinson!

  • 14 - 20 You're off to a good start. Keep at it.

  • Less than 14: Hey, we all gotta start somewhere

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on January 12, 2009 1:54 PM.

Four-eared Cats was the previous entry in this blog.

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