Certified Agile Service Manager General Practice 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Agile Service Management, what is the purpose of a 'sprint review'?
- Evaluate individual team member performance for raises
- Demonstrate completed work to stakeholders and gather feedback (Correct answer)
- Finalize the next sprint's budget
- Review security vulnerabilities in deployed code
Correct answer: Demonstrate completed work to stakeholders and gather feedback
The sprint review is a collaborative session where the team shows stakeholders what was built and collects feedback to inform future work.
Question 2: Which concept describes breaking down large service improvements into smaller, independently deliverable pieces?
- Vertical slicing (Correct answer)
- Waterfall decomposition
- Risk aggregation
- Technical debt accumulation
Correct answer: Vertical slicing
Vertical slicing cuts through all layers of a feature so each slice delivers end-to-end value independently, enabling faster feedback.
Question 3: A service team notices that incidents of the same type keep recurring. Which Agile/ITSM practice should they prioritize?
- Increasing the sprint cadence
- Conducting root cause analysis via Problem Management (Correct answer)
- Adding the incidents to the release backlog
- Escalating all recurring incidents to the CAB
Correct answer: Conducting root cause analysis via Problem Management
Problem Management investigates root causes of recurring incidents to prevent them from happening again.
Question 4: What is 'technical debt' in the context of Agile service delivery?
- Financial loans taken to purchase new hardware
- The accumulated cost of shortcuts taken now that must be addressed later (Correct answer)
- A legal liability arising from SLA breaches
- A measure of team overtime hours
Correct answer: The accumulated cost of shortcuts taken now that must be addressed later
Technical debt represents deferred work — quick fixes and workarounds that accumulate interest in the form of future rework and instability.
Question 5: Which Agile principle is MOST reflected in prioritizing customer-reported service issues over internal improvement tasks?
- Responding to change over following a plan
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation (Correct answer)
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Correct answer: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Prioritizing customer-reported issues reflects the Agile principle of valuing customer collaboration and delivering what customers actually need.
Question 6: In a Kanban service board, a 'blocker' card signals that:
- A work item is completed and ready for release
- A work item cannot progress until an impediment is resolved (Correct answer)
- A new feature request has been approved
- A team member is unavailable for the day
Correct answer: A work item cannot progress until an impediment is resolved
A blocker signals that a work item is stuck and needs an impediment removed before it can continue moving through the workflow.
Question 7: What does 'service value' mean in Agile Service Management?
- The monetary cost of delivering a service
- The combination of outcomes, usability, and warranty that a service provides to customers (Correct answer)
- The number of features included in a service release
- The speed at which tickets are closed
Correct answer: The combination of outcomes, usability, and warranty that a service provides to customers
Service value encompasses both utility (what the service does) and warranty (how reliably it does it), creating genuine worth for the customer.
Certified Agile Service Manager General Practice 4
In Agile Service Management, what is the purpose of a 'sprint review'?