Free SAFe-Agilist-6-0 sample questions

Correct answer: Utilizing Design Thinking to explore and define desirable, viable, and feasible solutions.

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that helps create products that customers love. It uses techniques like personas, empathy maps, and journey maps to understand the problem space and then ideates on potential solutions. This process is ideal for breaking down a high-level vision into tangible features that address specific user needs, making it the correct tool to bridge the gap described in the scenario.

Correct answer: The ART has significant wait times and delays in its workflow.

Flow Time measures the total time from when work starts until it is delivered. Flow Load measures the number of items currently in the system (WIP). A high Flow Time combined with a low Flow Load (not many items in progress) indicates that the few items in the system are taking a very long time to get through. This is a classic sign of significant delays, wait states, or bottlenecks in the process, rather than the system being overloaded with too much work.

Correct answer: Calculate the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) for both to determine the optimal sequence.

SAFe Principle #1, Take an economic view, is operationalized through the use of Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) for prioritization. WSJF provides a formula (Cost of Delay / Job Duration) to make economic decisions. Simply looking at Cost of Delay or job size in isolation is insufficient. Calculating WSJF for both initiatives provides a quantitative basis for sequencing work to maximize economic benefit.

Correct answer: Forming teams that are aligned to specific customer-facing value streams, such as 'Search & Discovery' and 'Checkout Process'.

The principle 'Organize around value' advocates for creating cross-functional teams and ARTs that can deliver end-to-end customer value with minimal dependencies. Structuring teams around value streams (like the checkout process) ensures that each team can independently deliver features that customers care about. This contrasts with component teams (UI, API), which create dependencies and hinder the flow of value.

Correct answers: Identify Value Streams and ARTs.; Train Lean-Agile Change Agents (SPCs).

Correct answer: False

This statement is false. 'Develop on Cadence, Release on Demand' decouples the development rhythm (cadence) from the release of value. While the ART develops and integrates on a fixed PI cadence, the business decides when to release that value based on market needs and business goals. A release can happen at any time, not just at the PI boundary.

Correct answer: Require the Epic Owner to decompose the Epic into smaller, incremental Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) that can be funded and delivered within the budget guardrails and coordinated with the Data Platform's capacity.

This is the best application of LPM principles. Large Epics introduce significant risk and delay value delivery. By breaking the Epic into smaller MVPs, GLI can validate the hypothesis incrementally, manage the investment within established guardrails (e.g., limits on single investments), and deliver value sooner. This approach also facilitates better coordination with the constrained 'Data Platform' value stream, allowing for smaller, more manageable pieces of work to be scheduled.

Correct answer: To ensure alignment on what should be built by researching, refining, and prioritizing requirements.

Continuous Exploration is the 'front-end' of the delivery pipeline. Its purpose is to foster innovation and build alignment on what to build. This involves activities like hypothesizing, collaborating with stakeholders, synthesizing research, architecting solutions, and prioritizing the backlog. It ensures that the ART builds the right thing, before focusing on building it right (Continuous Integration) and building it fast (Continuous Deployment).

Correct answer: Principle #8: Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

SAFe Principle #8 is based on Daniel Pink's work on motivation, which highlights that for knowledge workers, traditional extrinsic motivators (like bonuses) can be ineffective or even counterproductive. Instead, leaders should focus on fostering intrinsic motivation through autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives), mastery (the urge to get better at something that matters), and purpose (the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves). The manager's approach failed because it relied on an outdated extrinsic model.

Correct answer: To describe the steps an organization takes to sense a business opportunity and deliver an innovative solution in the shortest possible lead time.

The Business Agility Value Stream (BAVS) represents the fundamental flow of value for any business in the digital age. It starts with sensing an opportunity (market change, new technology, competitive threat) and ends with delivering an innovative business solution. The seven core competencies of business agility are the key enablers that allow an organization to execute its BAVS quickly and effectively.