CAE Agile Metrics & Reporting 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A team's cumulative flow diagram shows bands widening in the 'In Progress' stage over three sprints. What does this most likely indicate?
- Work is completing faster than it enters
- Work-in-progress limits are being violated or work is piling up (Correct answer)
- The team is delivering at a sustainable pace
- Backlog refinement is improving
Correct answer: Work-in-progress limits are being violated or work is piling up
Widening bands in the 'In Progress' column of a CFD indicate accumulation of WIP, often signaling bottlenecks or violated WIP limits.
Question 2: Which metric best helps a Scrum team evaluate whether their sprint planning accuracy is improving over time?
- Team velocity trend across sprints
- Percentage of sprint goal commitment completed (Correct answer)
- Number of defects found in regression testing
- Stakeholder satisfaction score
Correct answer: Percentage of sprint goal commitment completed
Tracking what percentage of committed sprint goals are actually completed shows whether sprint planning estimates are becoming more accurate.
Question 3: In the context of agile metrics, what does 'lead time' measure?
- Time from sprint start to sprint review
- Time from when a work item is requested to when it is delivered (Correct answer)
- Time to resolve a production defect
- Time a developer spends actively coding a feature
Correct answer: Time from when a work item is requested to when it is delivered
Lead time measures the total elapsed time from when a customer request is created until it is delivered, including wait time.
Question 4: A product owner wants to show executives how efficiently the team turns investment into customer value. Which metric is MOST appropriate?
- Sprint burndown rate
- Return on Investment (ROI) per release (Correct answer)
- Number of user stories completed
- Daily stand-up duration
Correct answer: Return on Investment (ROI) per release
ROI per release directly links the cost of development to the business value delivered, making it meaningful to executives.
Question 5: What is a risk of relying solely on velocity as the primary agile performance metric?
- It is too difficult to calculate accurately
- Teams may inflate story point estimates to appear more productive (Correct answer)
- It does not account for sprint duration
- It only applies to Kanban, not Scrum
Correct answer: Teams may inflate story point estimates to appear more productive
When velocity is treated as a performance target, teams may artificially inflate story point estimates, undermining the metric's usefulness.
Question 6: Which of the following BEST describes a 'throughput' metric in agile?
- The total number of story points planned for a release
- The number of work items completed per unit of time (Correct answer)
- The ratio of bugs to features delivered
- The average sprint length in weeks
Correct answer: The number of work items completed per unit of time
Throughput measures how many work items a team completes within a given time period, regardless of their size or complexity.
Question 7: An agile team's release burnup chart shows the scope line rising steeply while the completed work line rises slowly. What action is MOST appropriate?
- Increase velocity by adding more developers immediately
- Negotiate scope reduction or adjust the release date with stakeholders (Correct answer)
- Stop tracking the burnup and switch to a burndown chart
- Archive all incomplete stories into the next release automatically
Correct answer: Negotiate scope reduction or adjust the release date with stakeholders
When scope grows faster than completion, the team and product owner must negotiate scope trade-offs or adjust the timeline to remain realistic.
CAE Agile Metrics & Reporting 2
A team's cumulative flow diagram shows bands widening in the 'In Progress' stage over three sprints.
What does this most likely indicate?