CAD Collaborative Development Practices 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An Agile team wants to ensure knowledge is shared across all members. Which practice MOST directly achieves this?
- Maintaining detailed documentation in a wiki
- Rotating responsibilities and pairing on unfamiliar areas (Correct answer)
- Holding a monthly lunch-and-learn session
- Sending weekly status emails summarizing completed work
Correct answer: Rotating responsibilities and pairing on unfamiliar areas
Rotating responsibilities and cross-pairing actively transfers tacit knowledge that documentation cannot capture.
Question 2: What does 'continuous integration' require from a collaborative development team?
- Deploying to production after every commit
- Merging code changes to the mainline at least daily (Correct answer)
- Running integration tests only before a release
- Assigning one developer to own the build pipeline
Correct answer: Merging code changes to the mainline at least daily
Continuous integration requires frequent merges to the main branch, enabling early detection of integration issues.
Question 3: A developer notices a bug in code written by a teammate while working on an unrelated feature. What should they do in an Agile team?
- Leave it alone since they do not own that code
- Fix it immediately without telling anyone to avoid blame
- Fix or flag it, since collective ownership means anyone can improve any code (Correct answer)
- Wait until the next sprint retrospective to report it
Correct answer: Fix or flag it, since collective ownership means anyone can improve any code
Collective ownership empowers any developer to fix or flag issues regardless of who originally wrote the code.
Question 4: Which metric BEST signals that a team's collaboration on code reviews is healthy?
- No pull requests are ever rejected
- Average review turnaround time is under 4 hours (Correct answer)
- All comments are posted by the tech lead only
- Developers approve their own pull requests
Correct answer: Average review turnaround time is under 4 hours
Fast review turnaround indicates reviewers are engaged and the team treats code review as a first-class activity.
Question 5: In the context of Agile collaboration, what is 'swarming'?
- Multiple developers focusing simultaneously on a single blocked work item (Correct answer)
- A technique for running parallel sprints on the same product
- The process of splitting a large user story into smaller tasks
- An approach to estimating story points using planning poker
Correct answer: Multiple developers focusing simultaneously on a single blocked work item
Swarming means the team concentrates effort on one blocked item to unblock it quickly rather than starting new work.
Question 6: Why should an Agile team avoid 'siloed' specialization where only one person handles testing?
- Testing specialists slow down the sprint velocity
- It creates bottlenecks and reduces shared ownership of quality (Correct answer)
- Testers should be embedded in a separate QA team
- Specialized roles violate the Agile Manifesto
Correct answer: It creates bottlenecks and reduces shared ownership of quality
When testing is siloed, a single absence becomes a bottleneck and the whole team stops treating quality as their responsibility.
Question 7: A remote Agile team struggles with informal knowledge sharing that happens naturally in a co-located office. What practice helps compensate?
- Increase the sprint length to allow more time for communication
- Use virtual pairing and informal video check-in channels (Correct answer)
- Require all team members to be in the same time zone
- Replace daily standups with weekly written reports
Correct answer: Use virtual pairing and informal video check-in channels
Virtual pairing and informal video channels recreate the ambient communication that co-located teams get naturally.
CAD Collaborative Development Practices 3
An Agile team wants to ensure knowledge is shared across all members.
Which practice MOST directly achieves this?