Retrospectives & Continuous Improvement Flashcards
7 cards from real CAE practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Retrospectives & Continuous Improvement flashcards as text
Which retrospective technique asks team members to imagine the project has failed spectacularly and then identify what caused that failure?
Answer: Pre-mortem (Futurespective)
A pre-mortem (or futurespective) asks the team to project forward to a hypothetical failure and work backward to identify risks and causes.
During a retrospective, the team identifies an improvement action but nobody volunteers to own it. What is the BEST response?
Answer: Work with the team to find a volunteer or split responsibility
Unowned action items rarely get done; the facilitator should help the team negotiate ownership or shared responsibility to ensure follow-through.
The '4Ls' retrospective format stands for:
Answer: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for
The 4Ls framework captures what team members Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed for during the iteration.
A team's retrospective consistently produces the same action items sprint after sprint with little improvement. The MOST likely root cause is:
Answer: Action items are not tracked or followed up between retrospectives
When action items are not tracked or revisited, they are forgotten and the same issues resurface, creating a cycle of no improvement.
Which Agile value most directly underpins the retrospective ceremony?
Answer: Responding to change over following a plan
Retrospectives embody 'responding to change' by continuously adapting the team's process based on what is or isn't working.
In a retrospective, 'affinity mapping' is used to:
Answer: Group related observations into themes to spot patterns
Affinity mapping clusters similar sticky notes or ideas into themed groups, making it easier to identify systemic patterns from many individual data points.
The principle of 'inspect and adapt' is central to retrospectives because it:
Answer: Drives iterative process improvement within each cycle
Inspect and adapt means teams regularly examine their process and make targeted adjustments, which is exactly the purpose of a retrospective.