DAF Foundations OF Lean Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

Your team is struggling with 'gold plating' (adding unnecessary features). How does this affect the value stream?

Accepted Answer

It increases lead time without providing additional customer value.. Gold plating — adding features or polish beyond what the customer requested — consumes capacity without delivering additional customer value. In value-stream terms, this extra work increases lead time (and WIP) while producing no corresponding value, making it a form of waste (muda) that should be eliminated.

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It reduces lead time by keeping developers productive.

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It has no impact on the value stream.

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It improves the overall quality of the product.

Question 2

What is the primary Lean motivation for 'deferring commitment' until the last responsible moment?

Accepted Answer

To make decisions based on better, more current information.. Deferring commitment is a Lean principle that delays irreversible decisions until the last responsible moment, when the most information is available. This reduces the cost of change and the risk of deciding on outdated assumptions. The primary motivation is better decision quality through more current, complete information.

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To allow stakeholders to change their minds frequently.

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To keep the team busy with administrative work.

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To save money on project overhead.

Question 3

If you observe a high rate of 'blocked' items on your Kanban board, what is the most appropriate action?

Accepted Answer

Swarm on the blocked item to clear the impediment immediately.. A high rate of blocked items signals that work is getting stuck and flow is being disrupted, so the most appropriate action is to swarm on the blocked item to clear the impediment immediately. Swarming means the team temporarily focuses multiple people on the blocked work to unblock it, which restores flow and prevents the blockage from cascading into further delays. This is a core Kanban and Disciplined Agile practice for managing flow.

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Remove the blocked items from the board.

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Wait until the next daily stand-up to discuss the blocks.

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Start new work to keep the developers busy.

Question 4

You notice that the team's 'Cycle Time' is increasing despite no change in the amount of work. What should you investigate?

Accepted Answer

The presence of hidden queues between workflow states.. Cycle time increases when work spends more time waiting between workflow states, and hidden queues — unacknowledged wait states such as 'waiting for review', 'waiting for test environment', or 'waiting for approval' — are the most common cause. Investigating these queues reveals where work is piling up and why flow has slowed even though the volume of work has not changed.

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The team's office lighting.

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The number of coffee breaks taken.

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The team's motivation level.

Question 5

Which of these is the best definition of 'Value' in Lean?

Accepted Answer

Anything the customer is willing to pay for.. In Lean, value is defined from the customer's perspective: any activity or output for which the customer is willing to pay. This definition drives the identification of value-adding versus non-value-adding (waste) activities. Options A, C, and D are internal metrics that do not reflect customer willingness to pay.

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The number of tasks completed in a sprint.

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The total effort hours spent by the team.

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The number of lines of code written.

Question 6

A team is frustrated by 'rework'. Which Lean practice helps address this at the source?

Accepted Answer

Building quality in through practices like TDD and automated testing.. Lean addresses rework by preventing defects at the point of creation rather than detecting them later. Building quality in through Test-Driven Development (TDD) and automated testing shifts verification left, so defects never enter the codebase in the first place. This eliminates the root cause of rework — defective work products flowing downstream — instead of merely measuring or containing it.

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Assigning a dedicated person to track defects.

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Reducing the scope of the project.

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Increasing the testing phase duration.

Question 7

When analyzing a Value Stream Map, what does an 'invisible' queue represent?

Accepted Answer

Work waiting in an inbox or system that is not explicitly tracked.. In a Value Stream Map, an 'invisible' queue represents work that is waiting in a system or inbox but is not explicitly tracked or visualized on the map — for example, emails sitting in a shared mailbox or tickets in an untracked backlog. These queues still consume cycle time and hide waste, which is why making them visible is a key goal of value stream mapping.

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Future work that hasn't been started.

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Work that has been completed but not yet verified.

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The time spent in planning meetings.

Question 8

Which of the following is an example of 'Inventory' waste in software development?

Accepted Answer

Code that is written but not yet tested or deployed.. In Lean and DevOps, 'Inventory' waste refers to work that has been started but not yet completed and delivered — anything sitting in a queue waiting for the next step. Code that is written but not yet tested or deployed is the classic software equivalent of unsold stock on a warehouse shelf: it has consumed effort but delivers no value until it flows through the pipeline. The longer it sits, the more it accumulates risk (merge conflicts, stale assumptions, defects) and the more it costs to eventually finish.

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The project management software license fees.

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The time developers spend in training.

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The office space rent.

Question 9

What is the primary Lean goal of 'Visual Management'?

Accepted Answer

To make the status of work and problems immediately apparent.. Visual Management in Lean uses physical or digital displays — kanban boards, andon cords, status lights, charts — to make the state of work and the presence of problems immediately obvious to anyone, without needing to ask. The goal is rapid detection and response: when a problem is visible, it can be swarmed and solved before it propagates.

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To track employee attendance.

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To reduce the amount of paper used in the office.

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To entertain the team during meetings.

Question 10

Which of these is a symptom of 'Overprocessing'?

Accepted Answer

Adding extra features or documentation that the customer did not request.. Overprocessing waste occurs when teams do more work than the customer requires or values — such as adding unrequested features, gold-plating, or producing documentation nobody reads. Option C directly describes this: extra features or documentation the customer did not request.

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Writing code in a professional IDE.

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Conducting daily check-ins.

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Maintaining a clean codebase.

Question 11

When a team is 'swarming', what are they doing?

Accepted Answer

Collaborating simultaneously to finish a single item.. Swarming in Agile means the entire team or a group of team members collaborates simultaneously on a single work item to finish it quickly, rather than each person working on separate tasks. This practice reduces work-in-progress (WIP), shortens cycle time for that item, and promotes knowledge sharing. It is a key technique in Kanban and Scrum for breaking through bottlenecks and accelerating delivery of high-priority items.

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Taking a break together to recharge.

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Working on as many tasks as possible at once.

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Dividing work into the smallest possible tasks.

Question 12

You are trying to improve flow in a cross-functional team. How does 'T-shaped' skill development support this?

Accepted Answer

It enables team members to help each other, preventing bottlenecks.. T-shaped skills allow team members to jump in and help others during bottlenecks, preventing work from stalling.

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It reduces the need for salary increases.

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It increases the number of people available for specialized tasks.

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It makes documentation unnecessary.

Question 13

Why does a 'Push' system often lead to lower quality?

Accepted Answer

It forces work into the system, causing teams to rush.. A Push system schedules work into the process based on forecasts or external demands, regardless of whether the team has capacity to handle it. This forces work into the system, often causing teams to rush, multitask, and cut corners on quality practices like testing and review. The result is higher defect rates, increased rework, and lower overall quality.

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It encourages too much collaboration.

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It makes it too easy to track progress.

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It allows for too much testing time.

Question 14

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 15

Which is a common symptom of a 'bottleneck' in a Lean workflow?

Accepted Answer

A queue of work building up before a specific process step.. In Lean, a bottleneck is the process step with the least capacity, causing work to accumulate in front of it. The visible symptom is a queue of work-in-progress (WIP) building up before that step, which increases lead time and hides problems. Identifying and relieving bottlenecks (e.g., via Theory of Constraints) is central to Lean flow.

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Very short cycle times.

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High employee satisfaction levels.

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The team having no work to do.