Agile Business Analysis In Scrum Environment 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: During a Sprint Retrospective, the BA advocates for adding a 'peer review of acceptance criteria' step before each Sprint Planning. Which category does this improvement action fall under in retrospective terms?
- What went well
- What to stop doing
- What to start doing (Correct answer)
- What to keep doing
Correct answer: What to start doing
A new process step the team hasn't tried before is categorized as something to start doing.
Question 2: A Scrum team is building a complex insurance claims system. The BA wants to ensure traceability between business requirements and user stories. Which lightweight approach best fits an Agile environment?
- Create a formal requirements traceability matrix updated after every sprint
- Tag user stories with related business objective IDs and maintain a living document (Correct answer)
- Defer traceability to the end of the release
- Use UML diagrams to link each story to the business requirement
Correct answer: Tag user stories with related business objective IDs and maintain a living document
Lightweight tagging and living documents maintain traceability without the overhead of formal traceability matrices in Agile contexts.
Question 3: The Product Owner is unavailable for three days during sprint execution. Stakeholders bring requirement clarifications directly to developers. What should the BA do?
- Accept all stakeholder clarifications to keep the sprint moving
- Help the team triage clarifications, documenting them for PO review upon return (Correct answer)
- Escalate to the Scrum Master to cancel the sprint
- Ignore the stakeholders until the PO returns
Correct answer: Help the team triage clarifications, documenting them for PO review upon return
The BA can serve as a liaison to capture and triage clarifications while ensuring the PO makes final decisions upon return.
Question 4: Which technique is most effective when a BA needs to split a large Epic into Sprint-sized user stories?
- Story mapping to identify workflow steps and slice vertically (Correct answer)
- Creating a work breakdown structure (WBS)
- Decomposing by system architecture layers
- Writing all stories before any sprint begins
Correct answer: Story mapping to identify workflow steps and slice vertically
Story mapping organizes stories by user workflow, making it easier to identify thin vertical slices that deliver end-to-end value.
Question 5: In Scrum, the Increment must meet the Definition of Done (DoD). Who defines the DoD?
- The Product Owner alone
- The Scrum Master alone
- The Development Team, with input from the organization (Correct answer)
- External stakeholders and auditors
Correct answer: The Development Team, with input from the organization
The Development Team creates the DoD, often guided by organizational standards, to ensure transparency about what 'done' means.
Question 6: A BA needs to model a complex business process that spans multiple sprints for a Scrum team. Which artifact is most suitable for communicating the overall process flow?
- Sprint burndown chart
- Business process model (BPMN diagram) (Correct answer)
- Team velocity chart
- Sprint backlog table
Correct answer: Business process model (BPMN diagram)
A BPMN diagram effectively models complex cross-sprint business processes and helps the team understand the larger workflow context.
Question 7: During refinement, a stakeholder insists on a feature that the BA believes conflicts with the product vision. What is the most appropriate BA action?
- Add the feature to the backlog immediately to satisfy the stakeholder
- Facilitate a conversation between the stakeholder and Product Owner to align on vision (Correct answer)
- Reject the feature request outright
- Escalate to senior management
Correct answer: Facilitate a conversation between the stakeholder and Product Owner to align on vision
The BA facilitates alignment discussions rather than making unilateral acceptance or rejection decisions about backlog items.
Agile Business Analysis In Scrum Environment 3
During a Sprint Retrospective, the BA advocates for adding a 'peer review of acceptance criteria' step before each Sprint Planning.
Which category does this improvement action fall under in retrospective terms?