sasm Practice Questions

This statement is false. While the IP Iteration does provide a small, estimating guard band, its primary purposes are innovation, continuing education, PI Planning readiness, and the Inspect & Adapt workshop. Routinely using it to finish standard work is an anti-pattern that undermines predictability and eliminates the time needed for its intended value-adding activities.

The scenario describes a lack of focus and prioritization. The PI Vision is the critical artifact that synthesizes business goals into a clear, concise message about the purpose of the upcoming PI. It provides the 'why'. The top 10 Features list provides the 'what', giving teams a prioritized, manageable set of goals to focus on during PI Planning. Without these inputs, PI Planning becomes a bottom-up exercise with no strategic alignment, leading to the chaos described.

An Advanced Scrum Master's role is to coach and facilitate, not to dictate solutions or immediately escalate. The best approach is to bring the teams together to solve their own problem. By facilitating a session focused on objective facts (how the API is used vs. how it was designed) and creating shared understanding, the Scrum Master empowers the teams to develop a sustainable solution and improve their future collaboration through clear working agreements.

The Program Predictability Measure is a key SAFe metric. It is calculated by comparing the actual business value achieved for PI Objectives against the planned business value. This metric directly assesses how well the ART is able to deliver on its commitments, which is the definition of predictability. It is a primary output of the Inspect & Adapt workshop.

This describes the principle of U-curve optimization. Holding cost (cost of delay) decreases as batch size gets smaller, while transaction cost (overhead of processing each batch) increases. The total cost is the sum of these two. The optimal batch size is at the lowest point of this 'U' shaped total cost curve, which represents the best economic trade-off. The goal is to lower the entire curve by reducing transaction costs through automation.

The most effective initial action is to facilitate direct communication and problem-solving among the teams. A Scrum of Scrums during the breakout provides a dedicated forum for dependency management and negotiation, empowering the teams to self-organize and align their plans. Stopping the event is a drastic measure, escalating to management removes team ownership, and documenting dependencies without resolving them does not address the core issue of collaboration.

The primary cause of increasing lead time and aging WIP is having too many items in progress simultaneously. Visualizing the workflow and implementing explicit WIP limits forces the team to focus on completing existing work before starting new items. This directly tackles the problem described, improves predictability, and reduces context switching. While other accelerators are valuable, limiting WIP is the foundational first step for this specific scenario.

The '1-2-4-All' liberating structure is specifically designed to address this type of dysfunction. It allows for individual, silent reflection first (1), ensuring that everyone's initial thoughts are captured without being influenced or shut down by dominant personalities. The subsequent sharing in pairs (2), then fours (4), and finally with the whole group (All) creates a safer, more structured environment for all ideas to be heard and considered. This directly promotes psychological safety and balanced participation.

The problem-solving workshop's main goal is to move beyond symptoms and perform a root cause analysis (e.g., using Fishbone diagrams or 5 Whys) on the most significant challenges the ART faced during the Program Increment. The outcome is a set of actionable improvement items that are added to the ART backlog to be worked on in the next PI, fostering relentless improvement.

This statement is false. While the Release Train Engineer (RTE) facilitates dependency management and helps remove impediments, the primary responsibility lies with the Agile teams themselves. SAFe promotes self-organization and decentralized decision-making, encouraging teams to communicate and resolve dependencies directly with each other, especially during PI Planning.