CAD Collaboration and Team Dynamics 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A team member consistently dominates sprint planning discussions, preventing others from contributing. What is the BEST first step for the Scrum Master?
- Remove the team member from future planning sessions
- Use facilitation techniques like round-robin or silent writing to balance participation (Correct answer)
- Ask the Product Owner to intervene and assign speaking slots
- Document the behavior and escalate to HR
Correct answer: Use facilitation techniques like round-robin or silent writing to balance participation
Facilitation techniques that give equal voice to all team members address participation imbalance without punitive measures.
Question 2: Which practice BEST supports the agile principle of building projects around motivated individuals?
- Assigning tasks based on manager decisions
- Creating individual performance bonuses tied to story points
- Allowing teams to self-organize and choose how to accomplish their work (Correct answer)
- Tracking individual velocity to identify top performers
Correct answer: Allowing teams to self-organize and choose how to accomplish their work
Self-organization empowers motivated individuals to determine the best way to complete their work, honoring this agile principle.
Question 3: Two developers on your team have conflicting opinions on the technical approach for a user story. The sprint deadline is in two days. What should happen?
- The Scrum Master decides which approach to use
- The team resolves it through a brief technical discussion and reaches a consensus (Correct answer)
- Each developer implements their own approach and the best one is chosen later
- The conflict is deferred to the next sprint retrospective
Correct answer: The team resolves it through a brief technical discussion and reaches a consensus
Agile teams are self-organizing and expected to resolve technical conflicts through open discussion and consensus.
Question 4: What does the concept of 'psychological safety' contribute to agile team collaboration?
- It ensures all team members feel safe from layoffs
- It allows team members to speak up, take risks, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment (Correct answer)
- It guarantees that retrospectives remain confidential from management
- It requires senior developers to mentor junior ones during pairing sessions
Correct answer: It allows team members to speak up, take risks, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment
Psychological safety enables honest communication and experimentation, which are foundational to continuous improvement in agile.
Question 5: An agile team is spread across three time zones. Which practice MOST directly addresses asynchronous collaboration challenges?
- Requiring all team members to work the same core hours regardless of time zone
- Replacing the Daily Scrum with a written async standup update shared on a shared channel (Correct answer)
- Canceling the Daily Scrum entirely for distributed teams
- Assigning a dedicated coordinator in each time zone to relay information
Correct answer: Replacing the Daily Scrum with a written async standup update shared on a shared channel
Async written standups preserve the transparency and synchronization goal of the Daily Scrum while accommodating distributed time zones.
Question 6: During a retrospective, a team member says, 'Nothing ever changes from these retrospectives.' What is the most effective response?
- Skip future retrospectives to avoid negativity
- Ask the Product Owner to enforce action items from retrospectives
- Review past action items together and commit to one specific, measurable improvement for the next sprint (Correct answer)
- Replace the retrospective with a team-building exercise
Correct answer: Review past action items together and commit to one specific, measurable improvement for the next sprint
Reviewing past action items and committing to concrete improvements demonstrates that retrospectives produce real change.
Question 7: What is the primary benefit of co-locating agile team members?
- It reduces the need for documentation since communication is verbal
- It enables richer, faster communication through osmotic information sharing (Correct answer)
- It allows management to monitor productivity more easily
- It eliminates the need for sprint ceremonies
Correct answer: It enables richer, faster communication through osmotic information sharing
Co-location enables osmotic communication where team members absorb context passively, accelerating decision-making and reducing misunderstandings.
CAD Collaboration and Team Dynamics 2
A team member consistently dominates sprint planning discussions, preventing others from contributing.
What is the BEST first step for the Scrum Master?