DAF Practice Exam 3 — 20 Questions

Question 1

Which layer of the DA framework is responsible for aligning team efforts with the overall enterprise strategy?

Accepted Answer

Portfolio Management. In the Disciplined Agile framework, Portfolio Management is the layer that connects enterprise strategy to the work of delivery teams by selecting, prioritising, and funding initiatives. It ensures that team efforts roll up to strategic goals rather than operating in isolation. The other layers address team-level or awareness concerns, not strategic alignment.

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Team Level

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Enterprise Awareness

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Governance

Question 2

A team is transitioning from a traditional project management approach to Disciplined Agile. Which mindset shift is most critical for the team to embrace during their first iteration?

Accepted Answer

Focusing on delivering high-value, working software early and often. The core of Disciplined Agile is the pragmatic shift towards value delivery over rigid adherence to process, emphasizing a 'choose your way of working' approach.

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Eliminating all documentation throughout the lifecycle

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Strict adherence to the project charter

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Reducing the team size to improve velocity

Question 3

A team is working on a complex project with multiple dependencies. Which process goal is most relevant for managing these?

Accepted Answer

Coordinate Activities.. The 'Coordinate Activities' process goal is specifically designed to address the coordination of work across teams, dependencies, and shared resources. In a complex project with multiple dependencies, this goal ensures that activities are aligned, dependencies are managed, and communication flows effectively. It provides the practices and guidance needed to synchronize work across team boundaries.

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Grow Team Members.

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Improve Team Velocity.

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Produce Potentially Consumable Solution.

Question 4

A team is having trouble delivering value because they lack clear roles. Which DA process goal addresses role definition?

Accepted Answer

Form Team. In Disciplined Agile, the 'Form Team' process goal explicitly addresses establishing the team's structure, including defining roles, responsibilities, and working agreements. When a team lacks clear roles, the Form Team goal is the correct DA process goal because it covers team formation activities such as identifying needed skills, assigning roles, and establishing how the team will operate. This is distinct from coordination, risk, or scope goals.

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Coordinate Activities

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Address Risk

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Explore Initial Scope

Question 5

When two team members disagree on the 'best' practice, how should the team resolve it according to DA?

Accepted Answer

Try one, then the other, and see which works better in their context.. Disciplined Agile advocates for an empirical, context-driven approach to resolving disagreements. Rather than defaulting to authority or seniority, the team should try one practice, then the other, and evaluate which works better in their specific context. This aligns with DA's principle of 'Choice is Good' and its emphasis on guided continuous improvement through experimentation and feedback.

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Avoid both and do nothing.

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The project manager decides.

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Follow the most senior person's suggestion.

Question 6

Which TWO are common 'Agile' ceremonies?

Accepted Answer

Retrospective. Retrospective (A) is a core Agile ceremony held at the end of each iteration/sprint, where the team inspects how it worked and identifies improvements to apply in the next sprint. Sprint Planning (E) is also a standard Scrum/Agile ceremony that occurs at the start of every sprint to define the sprint goal and select the backlog items the team will deliver. Both are recurring, team-level events that support iterative delivery and continuous improvement. In contrast, budget approval (B) and weekly executive status reporting (D) are governance/reporting activities rather than Agile ceremonies, and a one-time project planning meeting at the start (C) reflects a traditional waterfall approach, not the recurring planning cadence of Agile.

Answer

Budget approval meeting

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Project planning meeting (held once at the start)

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Weekly status report to executives

Question 7

A stakeholder wants to change the scope mid-iteration. How should the team respond?

Accepted Answer

Discuss the impact and decide whether to incorporate it now or later. In agile/iterative delivery, scope changes mid-iteration are handled through collaborative impact assessment rather than unilateral action. The team should evaluate the change's effect on the iteration goal, capacity, and commitments, then decide with the product owner whether to incorporate it now (swapping equivalent work) or defer it to the backlog for a future iteration. This preserves the iteration's integrity while remaining responsive to stakeholder needs, which is the core of agile's 'welcome changing requirements' principle.

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Accept the change and immediately stop current work

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Refuse the change immediately

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Ignore the stakeholder and finish the original work

Question 8

Your team is experiencing 'context switching' due to frequent interruptions. Which Lean-inspired action is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Implement 'focus time' where interruptions are restricted.. Context switching from frequent interruptions destroys flow and increases cycle time, a form of Lean waste (muda). Implementing protected 'focus time' where interruptions are restricted directly addresses the root cause by allowing uninterrupted work, consistent with Lean's respect for people and flow efficiency. This is a low-cost, team-driven countermeasure.

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Ask the team to work longer hours.

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Require team members to answer emails immediately.

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Increase the number of daily meetings.

Question 9

A team has a very high lead time. They notice that work sits in a 'Pending Approval' state for 80% of the total time. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Implement automated approvals for low-risk changes.. The bottleneck is the approval wait state, which consumes 80% of lead time — a classic queue/wait problem, not a capacity problem. Automating approvals for low-risk changes removes the human queue entirely for a defined class of work, directly shrinking the largest contributor to lead time. This aligns with DevOps/DORA guidance: reduce batch size and manual gates, and reserve human approval for changes that genuinely carry risk.

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Report the delay to management.

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Conduct more frequent approval meetings.

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Increase the number of approvers to speed up the process.

Question 10

During a project, the team realizes the initial plan is no longer viable due to market changes. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Update the plan and pivot the strategy accordingly. Agile teams embrace change and pivot based on empirical evidence and feedback.

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Wait for the end of the year to reassess

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Ask the stakeholders to force the team to continue

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Stick to the original plan to show commitment

Question 11

You are leading a project with highly complex requirements. Which strategy does DA suggest for 'Explore Initial Scope'?

Accepted Answer

Use active stakeholder engagement and modeling. Disciplined Agile recommends exploring initial scope through active stakeholder engagement combined with modeling techniques such as user story mapping, impact mapping, and lightweight prototypes. This approach acknowledges that complex requirements cannot be fully specified upfront and are best discovered collaboratively with the people who will use and fund the solution.

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Write a full requirements document

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Delegate to the architecture team

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Guess the requirements

Question 12

Which DA process goal is specifically concerned with the early stages of a project to ensure the team is aligned?

Accepted Answer

Inception.. Inception is the Disciplined Agile (DA) process goal focused on the early stages of a project — aligning the team around a shared vision, scope, and initial architecture before delivery work begins. It covers activities like forming the team, identifying stakeholders, and setting up the initial plan. The other goals address later lifecycle concerns such as delivery, continuity, and velocity improvement.

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Ensure Continuity.

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Produce Potentially Consumable Solution.

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Improve Team Velocity.

Question 13

A team is building a high-criticality system (e.g., medical software). What is the DA approach to documentation?

Accepted Answer

Tailor documentation to meet regulatory and quality needs. DA's guidance is to tailor documentation to the actual regulatory, quality, and stakeholder needs of the system being built. For high-criticality systems like medical software, that means producing the traceability, design records, and verification evidence required by standards such as IEC 62304 or FDA design controls, but doing so incrementally rather than upfront. The principle is 'just enough documentation, just in time' scaled to risk.

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Rely solely on automated test cases as documentation

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No documentation is required as per Agile principles

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Document everything in detail before starting

Question 14

When applying the DA 'Choose Your WoW' tool, which factor is most important?

Accepted Answer

The team's current context. The 'Choose Your WoW' tool in Disciplined Agile is fundamentally about tailoring the way of working to the team's specific context. The most important factor is the team's current situation, including their size, distribution, skills, culture, and the nature of the work. This context-driven approach ensures that the chosen practices are fit for purpose rather than imposed from outside.

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The budget available

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Executive preference

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The latest industry trend

Question 15

What is 'Velocity' in an agile project?

Accepted Answer

A measure of the volume of work a team completes per iteration. Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a team completes in a given iteration.

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The total number of bugs found in the product

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The number of hours worked by the team

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The speed at which the project manager moves tasks

Question 16

Your organization is struggling with 'Shadow IT'—teams buying their own software without oversight. What is the Disciplined Agile view on this?

Accepted Answer

Provide organizational guidance on standards while allowing for innovation. Disciplined Agile advocates for a balanced approach to Shadow IT, where the organization provides guidance on standards and governance while still allowing teams the flexibility to innovate. This means establishing clear guidelines for software procurement and usage, but not imposing rigid bans that stifle innovation. The goal is to enable teams to make informed decisions that align with enterprise objectives.

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Fully decentralize all IT procurement decisions

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Force all teams to use legacy software only

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Ban all software purchases by individual teams

Question 17

When applying the DA toolkit, what is the best way to handle conflicting advice from different agile experts?

Accepted Answer

Evaluate the trade-offs of both approaches within the context of your team's unique situation.. Disciplined Agile is a pragmatic, context-driven toolkit rather than a prescriptive method, so conflicting expert advice is resolved by weighing trade-offs against your team's specific situation. Option C reflects the DA principle of 'choice is good' — you tailor practices based on your context, not on authority or avoidance. The DA toolkit explicitly provides guidance for choosing between options via its process goals and decision points.

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Follow your current process to avoid conflict.

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Combine both approaches into one process.

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Choose the advice from the most famous expert.

Question 18

A team has decided to add a new 'quality assurance' practice to their WoW. According to DA, what should they do first?

Accepted Answer

Evaluate the practice in the context of their team's goals and constraints.. In DA, every practice decision — including adding a new quality assurance practice — must be evaluated against the team's specific goals, constraints, and context factors before adoption. DA's 'choose your WoW' philosophy treats practices as options with trade-offs, not as universal best practices to be adopted on faith. The team should first assess whether the practice addresses a real problem, what it costs in effort and complexity, and how it fits their existing way of working.

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Check if it's the 'standard' practice in the company.

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Ask the vendor for a recommendation.

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Adopt it immediately and see if it works.

Question 19

Which of the following is considered 'Waste' (Muda) in a software development process?

Accepted Answer

Developing features that the customer will never use.. In lean/Disciplined Agile thinking, waste (Muda) is any activity that consumes resources without creating value for the customer. Developing features the customer will never use is the canonical example of 'extra features' waste (overproduction), because the effort, code, and maintenance burden deliver zero customer value. Eliminating it via prioritization, MVP thinking, and validated learning is a core DA principle.

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Performing automated unit tests.

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Conducting a sprint demo.

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Collaborating on design documents.

Question 20

Which THREE of these are considered 'wastes' (muda) in a software development context?

Accepted Answer

Waiting for information. In Lean software development, muda (waste) refers to any activity that consumes resources without creating value for the customer. Option B (Waiting for information) is correct because idle time spent blocked on handoffs, approvals, or missing requirements adds delay and no customer value. Option D (Defect rework) is correct because reworking bugs or failed builds is pure waste—effort spent correcting work that should have been done right the first time, echoing the Lean principle of building quality in. Option E (Unnecessary features) is correct because building functionality the customer did not request (overproduction/extra features) consumes effort and increases complexity without delivering value. By contrast, option A (Code reviews) is a value-adding quality practice that catches defects early, and option C (Team collaboration) is essential knowledge-sharing that reduces waste rather than creating it, so neither is classified as muda.

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Code reviews

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Team collaboration