SA SAFe Agilist Metrics and Performance 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A Portfolio Kanban board shows many epics stuck in the 'Analyzing' state. Which metric would BEST help quantify this problem?
- Flow Velocity
- Flow Load
- Flow Time (Correct answer)
- Flow Distribution
Correct answer: Flow Time
Flow Time measures how long epics take to move through the portfolio Kanban, and high values in specific states expose bottlenecks like excessive time in analysis.
Question 2: What does the SAFe 'Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration' allow teams to measure or assess at the end of a PI?
- Individual developer performance through code reviews
- Actual vs. planned velocity trends over the entire PI
- Team health, technical debt level, and readiness for next PI Planning (Correct answer)
- Customer Net Promoter Score for the features delivered
Correct answer: Team health, technical debt level, and readiness for next PI Planning
The IP Iteration provides time for inspect-and-adapt activities including assessing team health, addressing technical debt, and preparing for the next PI.
Question 3: In SAFe, which Lean-Agile measure reflects the percentage of time a system or value stream is available and performing correctly for end users?
- Mean Time to Restore (MTTR)
- Release frequency
- System availability / uptime (Correct answer)
- Defect escape rate
Correct answer: System availability / uptime
System availability (uptime percentage) is the key operational metric indicating how reliably the product serves end users without downtime.
Question 4: During an Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event, the problem-solving workshop produces improvement stories. Where do these stories go?
- Directly into the current iteration's sprint backlog
- Into the ART Backlog as PI Objectives for the next PI
- Into team backlogs as part of the next PI Planning commitment (Correct answer)
- Into the Portfolio Kanban as new Epics
Correct answer: Into team backlogs as part of the next PI Planning commitment
Improvement stories from the I&A workshop are committed to in the next PI Planning session and tracked in team backlogs as real work.
Question 5: Which metric directly reflects customer experience in the SAFe measurement framework?
- PI Predictability
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) (Correct answer)
- Flow Velocity
- Code coverage percentage
Correct answer: Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) captures customer loyalty and satisfaction, serving as the primary customer-centric outcome metric in SAFe.
Question 6: In SAFe, 'escaped defects' as a quality metric refers to defects found in which environment?
- Unit test runs during development
- System Demo during the PI
- SIT or staging environments before release
- Production after release to customers (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Production after release to customers
Escaped defects are those that bypass all quality gates and reach production, where customers discover them, making them the most costly quality failures.
Question 7: A SAFe Business Owner sets the Business Value score for a PI Objective at 10, but the team actually delivers it partially. How is this reflected in PI Predictability?
- The objective is counted as 100% delivered since it was completed
- The Business Owner re-scores actual Business Value achieved, and the ratio is calculated (Correct answer)
- The team's velocity is penalized by the undelivered story points
- The PI is marked as failed and replanning is required
Correct answer: The Business Owner re-scores actual Business Value achieved, and the ratio is calculated
After the PI, Business Owners score actual Business Value achieved (0–10) for each objective, and predictability is the ratio of actual to planned Business Value.
SA SAFe Agilist Metrics and Performance 3
A Portfolio Kanban board shows many epics stuck in the 'Analyzing' state.
Which metric would BEST help quantify this problem?