Certified Agile Service Manager Kanban, Lean, and DevOps 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In Kanban, an 'expedite' class of service is typically reserved for:
- All items in the current sprint
- Items with the highest financial or regulatory urgency that bypass normal WIP limits (Correct answer)
- Items that have been waiting longest in the queue
- Items assigned to senior team members
Correct answer: Items with the highest financial or regulatory urgency that bypass normal WIP limits
Expedite items represent critical emergencies that justify bypassing normal WIP limits due to severe business impact.
Question 2: Which Lean waste category best describes a software team holding detailed requirements documents that become outdated before development starts?
- Overproduction (Correct answer)
- Defects
- Waiting
- Extra processing
Correct answer: Overproduction
Creating detailed documents before they are needed is overproduction — producing more than what is currently required.
Question 3: In DevOps, what is the primary role of 'Infrastructure as Code' (IaC)?
- Writing application logic in infrastructure languages
- Managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files (Correct answer)
- Documenting network diagrams in code format
- Replacing software developers with operations engineers
Correct answer: Managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files
IaC treats infrastructure configuration as versioned code, enabling consistent, automated, and repeatable environment provisioning.
Question 4: A team using Kanban wants to forecast when a specific item will be delivered. Which technique is most appropriate?
- Story point estimation by the whole team
- Monte Carlo simulation using historical throughput data (Correct answer)
- Asking the product owner for a date
- Gantt chart scheduling
Correct answer: Monte Carlo simulation using historical throughput data
Monte Carlo simulation uses historical cycle time and throughput data to generate probabilistic delivery forecasts without estimation.
Question 5: The Lean concept of 'Jidoka' (autonomation) in software development is best represented by:
- Automated tests that halt the build pipeline when defects are detected (Correct answer)
- Self-organizing development teams
- Automatic sprint planning tools
- AI-generated user stories
Correct answer: Automated tests that halt the build pipeline when defects are detected
Jidoka means building in quality by stopping the process automatically when a problem occurs, mirrored in CI/CD by failing the pipeline on test failures.
Question 6: In an Agile Service Management context, Kanban's 'pull system' means:
- Team members select work based on current capacity rather than being assigned work (Correct answer)
- Customers pull products directly from developers
- Management assigns work using a push-based scheduling system
- Work items are pulled from the backlog at the start of each sprint
Correct answer: Team members select work based on current capacity rather than being assigned work
A pull system lets team members pull new work only when they have capacity, preventing overloading and protecting flow.
Question 7: Which DevOps metric measures how quickly a team can restore service after a production failure?
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR) (Correct answer)
- Change failure rate
Correct answer: Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
MTTR measures the average time from a failure occurring to service being fully restored, indicating operational resilience.
Certified Agile Service Manager Kanban, Lean, and DevOps 4
In Kanban, an 'expedite' class of service is typically reserved for: