AAC Agile Planning & Estimation 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Agile, story points are best described as a measure of:
- Calendar time required to complete a story
- Relative effort, complexity, and uncertainty of a user story (Correct answer)
- The number of tasks within a user story
- The business value delivered by a user story
Correct answer: Relative effort, complexity, and uncertainty of a user story
Story points represent the relative size of a user story in terms of effort, complexity, and uncertainty rather than actual time.
Question 2: What is the primary purpose of Planning Poker in Agile estimation?
- To assign tasks to individual team members fairly
- To enable managers to set delivery deadlines
- To leverage collective team knowledge and reduce anchoring bias during estimation (Correct answer)
- To document the official estimate for contractual purposes
Correct answer: To leverage collective team knowledge and reduce anchoring bias during estimation
Planning Poker uses simultaneous card reveals to harness collective wisdom and prevent anchoring bias that occurs when someone states an estimate first.
Question 3: A Scrum team's velocity is calculated as:
- The number of sprints completed in a quarter
- The total story points planned at the beginning of the sprint
- The average number of story points completed per sprint over recent sprints (Correct answer)
- The maximum story points the team has ever completed in a single sprint
Correct answer: The average number of story points completed per sprint over recent sprints
Velocity is the average of story points the team has successfully completed across recent sprints, used to forecast future capacity.
Question 4: During Sprint Planning, the team commits to work based on:
- The product owner's full wish list for the release
- The team's capacity and historical velocity (Correct answer)
- Management's project deadline requirements
- The number of developers available in the organization
Correct answer: The team's capacity and historical velocity
Sprint Planning uses the team's capacity for the sprint and their historical velocity to determine a realistic and achievable sprint goal.
Question 5: Which of the following best describes a 'Definition of Ready' (DoR) in Agile planning?
- Criteria that define when a sprint is ready to be closed
- Agreed conditions a user story must meet before it can be pulled into a sprint (Correct answer)
- The team's readiness checklist before a product launch
- The acceptance criteria written by the product owner for each story
Correct answer: Agreed conditions a user story must meet before it can be pulled into a sprint
The Definition of Ready is a checklist of conditions (e.g., clear acceptance criteria, estimated, small enough) that a story must satisfy before the team brings it into a sprint.
Question 6: Release planning in an Agile project primarily aims to:
- Assign exact delivery dates to every feature in the product backlog
- Provide a high-level forecast of which features may be ready by a target date based on velocity (Correct answer)
- Replace sprint planning once the project scope is finalized
- Lock scope and budget for the entire product lifecycle
Correct answer: Provide a high-level forecast of which features may be ready by a target date based on velocity
Release planning uses velocity and backlog size to forecast likely delivery timelines, acknowledging that actual content may shift as learning occurs.
Question 7: When a team uses the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) for story point estimation, the main advantage is:
- It ensures estimates are always accurate to within one day
- The increasing gaps between numbers reflect growing uncertainty in larger estimates (Correct answer)
- It allows managers to convert story points directly into hours
- It forces the team to always split stories into smaller pieces
Correct answer: The increasing gaps between numbers reflect growing uncertainty in larger estimates
The Fibonacci sequence's increasing gaps model the reality that larger, more complex stories carry proportionally higher uncertainty, discouraging false precision.
AAC Agile Planning & Estimation 1
In Agile, story points are best described as a measure of: