Agile Business Analysis Delivery Horizon Activities 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: During the Delivery Horizon, stakeholders begin requesting detailed status reports every day. What is the MOST appropriate Agile BA response?
- Produce detailed written reports daily as requested
- Direct stakeholders to the team's information radiators and invite them to sprint reviews for live visibility (Correct answer)
- Refuse the request and refer stakeholders to the scrum master
- Schedule weekly formal status meetings instead
Correct answer: Direct stakeholders to the team's information radiators and invite them to sprint reviews for live visibility
Information radiators and sprint reviews provide transparent, always-current status without consuming BA or team time on report production.
Question 2: A BA is working in a scaled Agile environment (e.g., SAFe) during the Delivery Horizon. Which activity is UNIQUE to this context compared to a single-team setting?
- Writing user stories and acceptance criteria
- Coordinating feature dependencies and integration points across multiple agile release trains (Correct answer)
- Facilitating sprint retrospectives
- Maintaining a product backlog
Correct answer: Coordinating feature dependencies and integration points across multiple agile release trains
Scaled environments require explicit cross-train dependency coordination that does not exist in single-team delivery contexts.
Question 3: A BA observes that the team's sprint velocity has dropped significantly over the last three sprints. What is the BEST Agile BA contribution to diagnosing this?
- Increase the number of stories planned for the next sprint to compensate
- Analyze whether story quality, size consistency, or dependency blockers have changed across the affected sprints (Correct answer)
- Replace the scrum master to improve team performance
- Switch from two-week to one-week sprints immediately
Correct answer: Analyze whether story quality, size consistency, or dependency blockers have changed across the affected sprints
Velocity drops often trace to deteriorating story quality, inconsistent sizing, or hidden blockers — all areas where the BA's analysis adds value.
Question 4: Which of the following scenarios BEST illustrates the risk of 'requirements hoarding' during the Delivery Horizon?
- The BA documents too many stories in the backlog
- A BA holds extensive undocumented requirements knowledge that the team cannot access during delivery (Correct answer)
- The team pulls too many stories into a single sprint
- The product owner prioritizes high-complexity stories first
Correct answer: A BA holds extensive undocumented requirements knowledge that the team cannot access during delivery
Requirements hoarding creates a single point of failure where knowledge bottlenecked in one person blocks team progress during delivery.
Question 5: A BA wants to validate that a delivered feature solves the original business problem, not just meets its written acceptance criteria. Which technique is MOST appropriate in the Delivery Horizon?
- Re-running the original user acceptance test scripts
- Conducting outcome-based testing or usability observation with actual end users (Correct answer)
- Reviewing the feature against the project charter's scope section
- Asking the development team to self-certify feature correctness
Correct answer: Conducting outcome-based testing or usability observation with actual end users
Outcome-based testing with real users reveals whether the delivered solution actually achieves the intended business outcome, beyond just technical compliance.
Question 6: During the Delivery Horizon, a BA realizes that the original business case assumptions have changed significantly. The BEST action is to:
- Continue delivery unchanged because the project is already in progress
- Raise the changed assumptions with the product owner and sponsor to reassess priorities and potentially replan (Correct answer)
- Document the changes for a post-project review only
- Immediately halt all delivery pending a new business case approval
Correct answer: Raise the changed assumptions with the product owner and sponsor to reassess priorities and potentially replan
Surfacing changed assumptions allows stakeholders to make informed decisions about re-prioritization or replan, preventing wasted delivery effort.
Question 7: In the Delivery Horizon, which practice MOST supports the BA in ensuring regulatory compliance requirements are met without slowing delivery?
- Deferring all compliance checks to a final audit before release
- Embedding compliance acceptance criteria into relevant stories so they are verified continuously during delivery (Correct answer)
- Creating a separate compliance workstream managed by a different team
- Requiring legal sign-off on every user story before it enters a sprint
Correct answer: Embedding compliance acceptance criteria into relevant stories so they are verified continuously during delivery
Embedding compliance into story acceptance criteria makes it a continuous, built-in quality gate rather than a bottleneck at the end.
Agile Business Analysis Delivery Horizon Activities 5
During the Delivery Horizon, stakeholders begin requesting detailed status reports every day.
What is the MOST appropriate Agile BA response?