CDA Sprint Planning & Iteration Management 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In DAD, what is the recommended approach when a team discovers mid-sprint that a committed user story is too large to complete?
- Cancel the sprint and replan
- Split the story and carry the remainder to the next sprint (Correct answer)
- Ask the product owner to remove it from the sprint backlog
- Continue working on it and miss the sprint goal
Correct answer: Split the story and carry the remainder to the next sprint
DAD recommends splitting oversized stories and carrying the unfinished portion to the next sprint rather than canceling or abandoning work.
Question 2: Which Disciplined Agile term refers to the lightweight planning session held at the start of each iteration to align the team on work to be done?
- Iteration Kickoff (Correct answer)
- Sprint Review
- Coordination Meeting
- Team Sync
Correct answer: Iteration Kickoff
DA uses 'Iteration Kickoff' to describe the planning ceremony at the start of each time-box where the team aligns on goals and tasks.
Question 3: A DA team practicing Scrum chooses a two-week sprint. What factor most directly influences this length choice?
- The organization's fiscal cycle
- The team's ability to deliver a potentially shippable increment in that time (Correct answer)
- Stakeholder availability for reviews
- The number of items in the product backlog
Correct answer: The team's ability to deliver a potentially shippable increment in that time
Sprint length is primarily driven by how quickly the team can deliver a potentially shippable increment, balancing feedback frequency with delivery overhead.
Question 4: In Disciplined Agile, what does 'pulling work' mean during iteration planning?
- Importing backlog items from another team
- Team members selecting work they commit to completing, rather than having it assigned (Correct answer)
- Pulling stories from the Done column into production
- The Scrum Master assigning tasks based on skill matrix
Correct answer: Team members selecting work they commit to completing, rather than having it assigned
Pulling work means team members self-organize by choosing tasks they commit to, reflecting DA's emphasis on motivated, self-directing teams.
Question 5: When using a Kanban-style iteration in DA, how is 'done' defined for capacity purposes?
- When all items in the WIP limit column are moved right
- By throughput over a rolling time window rather than a fixed sprint boundary (Correct answer)
- When the daily standup confirms zero blockers
- By the number of story points completed in the week
Correct answer: By throughput over a rolling time window rather than a fixed sprint boundary
Kanban measures capacity through throughput (items completed per time period) over a rolling window, not against a fixed sprint boundary.
Question 6: Which DA principle explains why teams should avoid overloading a sprint with too many parallel work streams?
- Context switching reduces effective throughput and increases cycle time (Correct answer)
- Stakeholders prefer fewer deliverables per iteration
- Parallel streams require more retrospectives
- The Definition of Done cannot cover multiple streams
Correct answer: Context switching reduces effective throughput and increases cycle time
DA recognizes that excessive multitasking causes context switching overhead, reducing throughput and increasing the time each item takes to complete.
Question 7: In a DA team using SAFe-influenced planning, what is the purpose of the Program Increment (PI) Planning event relative to individual sprint planning?
- It replaces sprint planning for the entire PI duration
- It establishes cross-team dependencies and high-level objectives that individual sprints then decompose and execute (Correct answer)
- It produces the team's Definition of Done
- It assigns story points to all backlog items for the quarter
Correct answer: It establishes cross-team dependencies and high-level objectives that individual sprints then decompose and execute
PI Planning sets cross-team alignment on objectives and dependencies at the program level, which individual sprint plans then decompose into executable increments.
CDA Sprint Planning & Iteration Management 2
In DAD, what is the recommended approach when a team discovers mid-sprint that a committed user story is too large to complete?