DAF Practice Exam 1 — 20 Questions

Question 1

Why does the DA toolkit explicitly advise against 'standardizing' all teams on the same process?

Accepted Answer

Different teams have different contexts, and a single process would be suboptimal for most.. DA is built on the principle that there is no single 'best' process — the best process is the one that fits a team's specific context. Different teams face different constraints: team size, geographic distribution, regulatory compliance, technical debt, customer availability, and organizational culture. Standardizing all teams on one process would force many teams into practices that are suboptimal or even counterproductive for their situation, undermining the very adaptability DA is designed to enable. DA therefore recommends each team 'choose their WoW' and then consciously evolve it.

Answer

It is cheaper to let teams choose their own.

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DA is a marketing tool that discourages standardization to sell more training.

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Standardization is technically impossible.

Question 2

When applying 'Coordinate Activities' across multiple teams, what is the best DA approach?

Accepted Answer

Use a regular coordination meeting. DA recommends lightweight, regular coordination mechanisms — such as coordination meetings, scrum of scrums, or communities of practice — to align multiple teams without imposing rigid uniformity. A regular coordination meeting is the canonical DA approach for cross-team alignment. It preserves team autonomy while ensuring dependencies and integration points are managed.

Answer

Force all teams to use the same lifecycle

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Appoint a single manager for all teams

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Merge all teams into one large team

Question 3

How does DA handle technical debt?

Accepted Answer

Make it visible and plan for remediation. DA encourages managing technical debt through explicit visibility and planned remediation within the process goals.

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Assign it to a separate team

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Ignore it until the project is over

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Ban all technical debt

Question 4

Your team needs to scale their agile efforts. What should be your first step according to DA?

Accepted Answer

Assess the current team maturity and context. According to Disciplined Agile, the first step when scaling agile efforts is to assess the current team maturity and context. DA emphasizes that scaling is not a one-size-fits-all journey; you must understand where the team is now (their skills, culture, constraints) before choosing a scaling approach. This aligns with DA's principle of 'Context Counts' and its guided continuous improvement approach.

Answer

Switch to Kanban

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Add a Program Manager

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Implement SAFe immediately

Question 5

When dealing with stakeholders, what is the best practice in DA?

Accepted Answer

Actively engage them throughout the process. Best practice in Disciplined Agile (DA) is to actively engage stakeholders throughout the entire lifecycle, not just at the beginning or end. Continuous engagement ensures requirements stay aligned with real needs, feedback is incorporated early, and surprises at delivery are avoided. DA's principle of 'delighting customers' and its emphasis on collaboration make ongoing stakeholder involvement a core practice.

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Limit communication to email

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Avoid them until delivery

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Only talk to their manager

Question 6

What is the primary Lean goal of reducing the number of handoffs between specialized teams?

Accepted Answer

To minimize the opportunity for information loss and waiting.. In Lean, handoffs between specialized teams are a form of waste (specifically, waiting and defects from miscommunication). Each handoff introduces a queue, a transfer of tacit knowledge, and an opportunity for requirements or context to be lost. Reducing handoffs directly shrinks the opportunity for information loss and idle waiting time, which shortens lead time and improves flow.

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To increase the total number of specialized team members.

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To improve organizational visibility.

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To reduce the cost of payroll.

Question 7

Your organization is scaling Agile. What does Disciplined Agile suggest for scaling?

Accepted Answer

Choose a lifecycle that fits the specific needs of the teams. Disciplined Agile (DA) suggests that scaling Agile is not about adopting a single framework for all teams, but rather about choosing a lifecycle — such as Agile, Lean, Continuous Delivery, Program, or Hybrid — that fits the specific needs and context of the teams involved. This reflects DA's 'Choice is Good' principle and its recognition that different teams require different approaches.

Answer

Increase the size of individual teams to 50+ members

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Adopt a single framework like SAFe for all projects

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Standardize all teams to use the exact same process

Question 8

Which THREE of the following strategies help in 'scaling' Agile across multiple teams?

Accepted Answer

Use shared communication tools. Option B is correct because shared communication tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Slack, or Azure DevOps) give distributed Agile teams a single source of truth for backlogs, sprint boards, and impediments, enabling transparency and synchronization at scale. Option D is correct because coordinating activities across teams — through Scrum of Scrums, PI Planning, or dependency-mapping ceremonies — manages cross-team dependencies and integration points that inevitably arise when many teams work on one product. Option E is correct because a consistent Definition of Done ensures every team applies the same quality bar (e.g., code reviewed, tests passed, CI green, documentation updated), so increments from different teams are genuinely integratable and releasable. Option A is not correct because adding project managers increases overhead and central control rather than enabling the self-organizing, empirical flow that Agile scaling frameworks rely on. Option C is not correct because mixing frameworks per team (e.g., one Scrum, one Kanban, one SAFe) fragments terminology, cadence, and metrics, making cross-team coordination and shared planning far harder.

Answer

Increase the number of project managers

Answer

Ensure each team uses a different framework

Question 9

Which TWO of the following are common pitfalls of 'Push' systems?

Accepted Answer

Overwhelming the team with too much work.. Option B is correct because a Push system schedules and assigns work based on forecasted demand rather than actual capacity, so more work items are pushed into the team than they can complete, overwhelming the team with too much work. Option D is correct because when work is pushed faster than it can be finished, the excess accumulates as hidden queues (work-in-progress inventory) between process steps, increasing lead times and obscuring the true state of the workflow. Options A, C, and E are incorrect because Push systems are not known for perfectly matching supply with demand (they typically cause mismatch), do not inherently produce high team satisfaction (overload and hidden queues tend to reduce it), and do not automatically eliminate defects (defects must be detected and removed through explicit quality practices).

Answer

The ability to perfectly match supply with demand.

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High levels of team satisfaction.

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Automatic elimination of defects.

Question 10

What is the purpose of a 'Retrospective'?

Accepted Answer

To improve the team's way of working. Retrospectives are for team reflection and process improvement.

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To critique individual performance

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To report progress to the stakeholders

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To plan the next set of features

Question 11

When a team is geographically distributed, which process goal should be examined to ensure effective collaboration?

Accepted Answer

Coordinate Activities.. For geographically distributed teams, the process goal 'Coordinate Activities' is directly concerned with ensuring that work is aligned and synchronized across locations. This goal addresses the challenges of communication, handoffs, and dependency management that are exacerbated by distance and time zones. Examining this goal helps the team select practices that enable effective collaboration despite physical separation.

Answer

Improve Team Velocity.

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Address Changing Stakeholder Needs.

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Grow Team Members.

Question 12

A team finds that their current workflow is plagued by bottlenecks at the quality assurance stage, causing delays in delivery. According to Disciplined Agile, which action should the team prioritize to improve their process?

Accepted Answer

Implement the 'Improve Team Productivity' process goal by identifying and removing the specific constraint causing the delay.. In Disciplined Agile, when a workflow has a bottleneck (like QA), the team should apply the 'Improve Team Productivity' process goal, which explicitly includes identifying and removing constraints using lean/Theory of Constraints thinking. The QA stage is the constraint; the correct action is to find and eliminate it (e.g., automate tests, cross-train, shift-left quality) rather than optimize elsewhere. This aligns with DA's guidance to address the system constraint, not symptoms.

Answer

Focus on the process goal 'Coordinate Activities' to ensure all members are aligned.

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Increase the batch size to allow QA to process more items at once.

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Switch to a purely predictive model to ensure quality gates are strictly followed.

Question 13

What should a team do if they find that a practice they chose from the DA toolkit is no longer effective?

Accepted Answer

Consult the DA toolkit to identify alternative practices that better fit their current situation.. Disciplined Agile is explicitly a toolkit of options, not a fixed method: when a chosen practice stops delivering value, the team is expected to revisit the relevant decision point and select a different practice from the toolkit that better fits its current context. This is the essence of 'choose your WoW' combined with guided continuous improvement — the toolkit is the source of alternatives, and the team owns the choice.

Answer

Try to force the practice to work harder.

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Stick with it, because consistency is more important than efficiency.

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Report the failure to the PMO and ask for a new process.

Question 14

Which THREE of the following are foundational Lean thinking principles?

Accepted Answer

Elimination of waste.. Option B (Elimination of waste) is a foundational Lean principle because Lean defines value from the customer's perspective and systematically removes the seven wastes (muda) — overproduction, waiting, transport, overprocessing, inventory, motion, and defects — to improve flow. Option C (Respect for people) is equally foundational, as Lean relies on engaging, empowering, and developing employees so they can surface problems and improve their own work, which is why it is often paired with continuous improvement as the two pillars of Lean. Option E (Continuous improvement, or Kaizen) is correct because Lean treats improvement as an ongoing, incremental, everyone-everyday activity rather than a one-time project, using tools such as PDCA and kaizen events to sustain gains. Option A (Mandatory 12-hour work days) is not a Lean principle; Lean seeks to eliminate overburden (muri) and excessive hours, since fatigue undermines quality and kaizen. Option D (Centralized, hierarchical decision-making) is also not Lean, because Lean favors decentralized, fact-based decisions made close to the work (genchi genbutsu) with input from the people doing the job.

Answer

Mandatory 12-hour work days.

Answer

Centralized, hierarchical decision-making.

Question 15

Which process goal is concerned with defining the initial work to be done?

Accepted Answer

Explore Initial Scope. In Disciplined Agile, the Explore Initial Scope process goal is concerned with defining the initial work to be done — understanding the problem space, identifying the initial backlog or work items, and establishing a high-level view of what the team will deliver. It is one of the early process goals in the Inception phase and directly addresses the question of what work is in scope at the outset.

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Address Risk

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Form Team

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Coordinate Activities

Question 16

Your team is struggling with scope creep due to unclear requirements from stakeholders. Using Disciplined Agile principles, what is the most appropriate action?

Accepted Answer

Increase the frequency of stakeholder feedback loops. Scope creep from unclear requirements is best addressed by tightening and increasing feedback loops with stakeholders so requirements are clarified iteratively and misunderstandings surface early. DA favours frequent, lightweight stakeholder collaboration over documentation-heavy or scope-freezing approaches. This aligns with DA's principle of delighting customers through continuous engagement.

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Hire a dedicated business analyst to write detailed documentation

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Lock down the scope for the next six months

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Ignore the stakeholders until the product increment is finished

Question 17

Which of the following is a core DA principle?

Accepted Answer

Choice is Good. 'Choice is Good' is one of the foundational DA principles, reflecting the philosophy that teams should be empowered to select the practices, lifecycles, and tools that fit their context. It underpins the entire DA toolkit approach, where multiple options are presented rather than a single prescribed method. This principle distinguishes DA from prescriptive frameworks.

Answer

One right way to work

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Follow the plan strictly

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Documentation over code

Question 18

In the DA toolkit, what does 'WoW' stand for?

Accepted Answer

Way of Working. In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, 'WoW' is the acronym for 'Way of Working.' This term captures the unique combination of principles, practices, and processes that a given team adopts to deliver value in its specific context. DA deliberately uses 'WoW' rather than a fixed methodology because it recognizes that no two teams face identical constraints, so each team's WoW will differ.

Answer

World of Work

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Work of Wisdom

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Winning over Work

Question 19

A team has high 'wait time' between code completion and code review. How should they address this using Lean principles?

Accepted Answer

Incorporate code review into the 'In Progress' workflow state.. The team should pull the review into their workflow, making it a collaborative, immediate step rather than an external dependency.

Answer

Hire more senior developers to review code.

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Eliminate code reviews.

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Schedule all reviews for the end of the week.

Question 20

Which TWO of the following are essential components of a successful Value Stream Mapping session?

Accepted Answer

Objective data about cycle time and lead time.. Option A is correct because Value Stream Mapping depends on objective metrics such as cycle time (the time to complete one unit of work) and lead time (the total elapsed time from request to delivery), which expose real bottlenecks and delays rather than opinions. Option D is correct because the people who actually perform the work possess the detailed, tacit knowledge of handoffs, wait states, and workarounds, and their participation builds ownership of the resulting improvement actions. Options B, C, and E are not essential: a cost-cutting mandate can distort the map toward blame rather than flow, an external facilitator enforcing rigid rules suppresses the open, honest discussion VSM requires, and full automation is neither necessary nor always desirable since the goal is to identify and remove waste first.

Answer

A mandate from upper management to cut costs.

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An external facilitator to enforce rigid rules.

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A requirement to automate the whole process.