CAE Team Collaboration & Communication 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A distributed agile team struggles with misaligned understanding of sprint goals. Which communication practice best addresses this?
- Send detailed email summaries after every meeting
- Hold a synchronous sprint planning session with all members present (Correct answer)
- Post sprint goals in a shared document and assume everyone reads it
- Let each sub-team define their own interpretation of the goal
Correct answer: Hold a synchronous sprint planning session with all members present
Synchronous sprint planning ensures all distributed team members jointly agree on and understand the sprint goal in real time.
Question 2: Which agile ceremony is PRIMARILY designed to improve team collaboration processes rather than product work?
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Planning
- Daily Scrum
- Retrospective (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Retrospective
The Retrospective focuses on how the team works together and identifies improvements to collaboration and processes.
Question 3: An agile team has a member who consistently dominates discussions, silencing others. The Scrum Master should FIRST:
- Remove the member from the team
- Raise the issue privately with the dominant member (Correct answer)
- Ignore it since output quality is unaffected
- Escalate immediately to senior management
Correct answer: Raise the issue privately with the dominant member
Addressing the behavior privately first is a respectful, coaching-oriented approach aligned with agile servant leadership.
Question 4: In agile, 'working agreements' are BEST described as:
- Contractual obligations between the team and stakeholders
- Team-defined norms that guide how members interact and work (Correct answer)
- Management-imposed rules for daily standups
- Legal documents outlining project scope
Correct answer: Team-defined norms that guide how members interact and work
Working agreements are collaboratively created team norms that promote consistent, respectful interaction and productivity.
Question 5: A product owner is frequently unavailable for questions during a sprint. This MOST directly threatens which agile principle?
- Sustainable pace
- Technical excellence
- Business-developer collaboration (Correct answer)
- Simplicity
Correct answer: Business-developer collaboration
The Agile Manifesto values 'customer collaboration over contract negotiation,' and PO unavailability breaks this continuous collaboration.
Question 6: Which visual tool is MOST effective for making a team's work progress transparent to all members simultaneously?
- Gantt chart in a project management tool
- Physical or digital Kanban board (Correct answer)
- Weekly status email from the project manager
- Individual task lists in each member's notebook
Correct answer: Physical or digital Kanban board
A Kanban board provides real-time, shared visibility into work status for all team members at a glance.
Question 7: During a retrospective, a team member proposes an improvement but others are skeptical. The BEST approach is to:
- Table the idea indefinitely to avoid conflict
- Vote to dismiss it and move on quickly
- Assign one sprint to pilot the improvement and measure results (Correct answer)
- Let the Scrum Master decide unilaterally
Correct answer: Assign one sprint to pilot the improvement and measure results
Time-boxing an experiment respects the idea while letting empirical results guide the team's decision.
CAE Team Collaboration & Communication 2
A distributed agile team struggles with misaligned understanding of sprint goals.
Which communication practice best addresses this?