SA SAFe Agilist Metrics and Performance 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: In SAFe, what is the primary purpose of the Program Increment (PI) Predictability measure?
- To track individual team velocity across sprints
- To measure the percentage of Business Features completed versus planned
- To compare story points delivered vs. planned at the ART level (Correct answer)
- To evaluate the quality of PI Planning sessions
Correct answer: To compare story points delivered vs. planned at the ART level
PI Predictability measures the percentage of team PI objectives met, calculated as actual Business Value delivered divided by planned Business Value.
Question 2: Which metric is used in SAFe to indicate the average time from when a feature is requested until it is delivered?
- Cycle time
- Lead time (Correct answer)
- Throughput
- Flow efficiency
Correct answer: Lead time
Lead time measures the total elapsed time from when a feature enters the backlog until it is delivered to the customer.
Question 3: A SAFe ART consistently scores below 80% on PI Predictability. What is the MOST likely root cause to investigate first?
- Teams are not using story point estimation
- Features are not being decomposed into Stories properly
- PI Planning is not producing realistic capacity-based commitments (Correct answer)
- The Product Manager is setting incorrect Business Value scores
Correct answer: PI Planning is not producing realistic capacity-based commitments
Low PI Predictability most often stems from over-commitment during PI Planning where teams do not accurately match work to available capacity.
Question 4: In the context of SAFe flow metrics, what does 'Flow Load' measure?
- The number of features delivered per PI
- The total number of active items in progress across the value stream (Correct answer)
- The rate at which new work enters the system
- The ratio of value-adding steps to total steps in the process
Correct answer: The total number of active items in progress across the value stream
Flow Load measures the total active work in the system, and keeping it within WIP limits is critical to maintaining healthy flow.
Question 5: Which SAFe metric helps teams understand how much of their capacity is spent on value-adding work versus wait time?
- Flow Efficiency (Correct answer)
- Flow Velocity
- Flow Distribution
- Flow Time
Correct answer: Flow Efficiency
Flow Efficiency is the ratio of active time to total flow time, revealing how much time features spend waiting versus being actively worked on.
Question 6: An Agile Team reports high velocity but the ART is not meeting its PI objectives. What should the Release Train Engineer investigate?
- Whether teams are inflating story point estimates
- Whether team-level velocity aligns with feature delivery at the program level (Correct answer)
- Whether the Scrum Masters are facilitating retrospectives correctly
- Whether teams are using the correct definition of done
Correct answer: Whether team-level velocity aligns with feature delivery at the program level
High team velocity that doesn't translate to PI objective achievement indicates a disconnect between team-level work and program-level feature delivery.
Question 7: In SAFe, which level of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline is MOST directly measured by deployment frequency metrics?
- Continuous Exploration
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Deployment (Correct answer)
- Release on Demand
Correct answer: Continuous Deployment
Deployment frequency measures how often code is deployed to production, which is the core metric of the Continuous Deployment aspect of the pipeline.
SA SAFe Agilist Metrics and Performance 2
In SAFe, what is the primary purpose of the Program Increment (PI) Predictability measure?