SAFe-Agilist Practice Test 2 — 25 Questions

Question 1

Refer to the exhibit. Based on the provided metrics, what is the most significant indicator of a flow efficiency problem?

Accepted Answer

The large queue size of 12 features.. The large queue size relative to team velocity suggests that features are waiting significantly longer than they are being worked on. In a flow-based system, excessive queue sizes are the primary indicator that the system is 'stalled.' This waiting period represents a massive cost of delay and indicates that the team is failing to maintain a smooth, continuous flow of value, requiring an immediate reduction in active WIP to clear the backlog.

Answer

High team velocity.

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Average feature duration of 2 weeks.

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The iteration length is too short.

Question 2

Which THREE actions demonstrate 'Relentless Improvement' in a SAFe organization?

Accepted Answer

Conducting regular Inspect and Adapt (I&A) events.. Relentless Improvement is a pillar of the House of Lean, focusing on constant reflection and adjustment. It implies that the current way of working is never good enough and that there is always room to optimize. Organizations that embrace this pillar foster a culture where teams feel safe to experiment, learn from failure, and systematically apply changes to enhance their performance, quality, and speed of delivery over time.

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Rewarding teams for maintaining the status quo.

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Focusing exclusively on technical debt removal.

Question 3

Refer to the exhibit. Given the investment horizon distribution, how should the Portfolio Manager balance the allocation of resources?

Accepted Answer

Use the investment horizons to ensure a healthy balance between current operations and future innovation.. Effective portfolio management requires balancing investments across different horizons to ensure short-term revenue while preparing for future innovation. Horizon 1 focuses on current operations, Horizon 2 on scaling new solutions, and Horizon 3 on long-term research. By distributing budget appropriately across these horizons, the portfolio avoids either stagnating in old technology or over-investing in unproven ideas, ensuring a steady pipeline of value for the future of the enterprise.

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Allocate 90% of the budget to Horizon 3 to secure future market dominance.

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Focus all funding on Horizon 1 projects to maximize immediate quarterly profits.

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Require Horizon 3 projects to demonstrate profitability within the next two quarters.

Question 4

An organization is adopting SAFe and has formed its first Agile Release Train. During the third PI, the ART is delivering features but the Program Board shows many dependencies between teams. The RTE notices that teams are not updating their dependencies regularly and that some teams are working on items not aligned with the PI objectives. Which action should the RTE take first to improve flow?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate a retrospective focused on dependency management and reinforce the use of the Program Board during the current PI.. The RTE's first step should be to help the ART inspect and adapt its dependency management practices. A retrospective focused on this topic, combined with reinforcing the Program Board's use, allows teams to take ownership and improve flow. This approach aligns with SAFe's emphasis on decentralized decision-making and continuous improvement, rather than escalating or taking control away from teams.

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Escalate the dependency issues to the Lean Portfolio Management group for resolution.

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Cancel the current PI and start a new PI Planning session to reset dependencies.

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Ask the Scrum Masters to update the Program Board on behalf of their teams.

Question 5

During an Iteration retrospective, an Agile Team identifies that it frequently misses its Iteration Goals because of unplanned work. Which action best aligns with SAFe's principle of establishing team and technical agility?

Accepted Answer

Analyze the sources of unplanned work and implement improvements to reduce or eliminate them.. Analyzing and eliminating the sources of unplanned work is the most effective action because it addresses root causes and improves the team's ability to meet its Iteration Goals. This aligns with SAFe's principle of establishing team and technical agility through continuous improvement. By removing impediments to flow, the team enhances predictability and delivers more value.

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Ask the Product Owner to prioritize only planned work and reject all unplanned requests.

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Reserve a fixed percentage of each Iteration's capacity for unplanned work.

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Extend the Iteration length to provide more time to absorb unplanned work.

Question 6

When applying 'Participatory Budgeting' in a Lean Portfolio, who should be involved in the process?

Accepted Answer

A broad group of stakeholders, including Business Owners and ART representatives.. Participatory Budgeting is a collaborative process that engages the people closest to the work. By involving stakeholders, business owners, and representatives from the Agile Release Trains, the organization taps into collective intelligence. This increases transparency, fosters shared ownership of the portfolio outcomes, and ensures that budget decisions reflect a balanced view of both technical needs and market opportunities across the entire enterprise.

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Only the Finance Department and the Portfolio Manager.

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The executive leadership team exclusively, to ensure strategic alignment.

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The Agile Release Train engineers, to ensure technical accuracy.

Question 7

Refer to the exhibit. Which SAFe principle is directly supported by the "decentralized_decision": "enabled" setting in the configuration?

Accepted Answer

Principle 9: Decentralize decision-making.. This configuration directly supports Principle 9: Decentralize decision-making. By enabling this in the workflow, the organization explicitly moves away from centralized control. Decentralization is essential for organizational speed and engagement, as it ensures that decisions are made by those who have the most relevant information and the closest connection to the customer requirements, allowing for quicker responses to changes and more effective problem-solving at the team level.

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Principle 5: Base milestones on objective evaluation.

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Principle 6: Visualize and limit WIP.

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Principle 7: Apply cadence and synchronization.

Question 8

Which THREE factors are critical for calculating WSJF? (Choose three)

Accepted Answer

User-Business Value. WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) is a prioritization model used to optimize economic outcomes. It calculates the value of a job by dividing the Cost of Delay by the job size. The 'Cost of Delay' is further broken down into three components: User-Business Value, Time Criticality, and Risk Reduction or Opportunity Enablement. Understanding these ensures the team prioritizes the highest economic impact work first.

Answer

Team Velocity

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Total number of stakeholders

Question 9

What is the primary purpose of the Iteration Review in SAFe?

Accepted Answer

To inspect the increment and adapt the backlog based on feedback.. The Iteration Review provides a cadence for the team to demonstrate their progress to stakeholders and get feedback. It is a critical event for alignment, ensuring that the team is building the right thing. This event matters because it transforms the team's internal work into transparent progress, allowing for course correction based on real-world feedback rather than assumptions, which is essential for maintaining alignment with business goals.

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To identify process improvements for the next iteration.

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To assign specific tasks to team members for the next iteration.

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To approve the team's velocity for the next Program Increment.

Question 10

An Agile Release Train (ART) is struggling because teams are working in silos and are not integrating their work. Which principle should the Release Train Engineer emphasize to fix this?

Accepted Answer

Principle 2: Apply systems thinking.. Principle 2, Apply systems thinking, is the most relevant. It emphasizes that the efficiency of the whole system is more important than the efficiency of any individual part. In this case, the siloed teams are optimizing for their local work, which leads to integration failure. Systems thinking reminds everyone that the ART is a single system that must work together to deliver value, necessitating cross-team collaboration and integration.

Answer

Principle 3: Assume variability.

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Principle 1: Take an economic view.

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Principle 5: Base milestones on objective evaluation.

Question 11

Refer to the exhibit. Based on these metrics, which strategy should the ART prioritize to optimize Product Development Flow?

Accepted Answer

Implement small batch sizes and reduce handoffs.. The ratio of wait time to processing time is significantly high, indicating that the system suffers from excessive queueing. In product development, work spends most of its time waiting for the next process step, not being actively processed. By focusing on reducing wait times—often caused by handoffs, batch sizes, or resource contention—the ART can drastically improve overall lead time without necessarily needing to increase individual worker effort or speed.

Answer

Increase developer hours to improve processing time.

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Increase the throughput target for the next iteration.

Answer

Focus on automating the testing phase.

Question 12

A Scrum Master observes that a team is struggling to meet their Sprint Goals because they spend significant time resolving technical debt during the sprint. How should the team apply the concept of Built-in Quality to address this?

Accepted Answer

Adopt practices such as Test-Driven Development and Pair Programming to prevent defects.. Built-in Quality requires that quality is not an afterthought but integrated into the development process through practices like Test-Driven Development and pair programming. By incorporating these technical practices, the team reduces rework and prevents defects from accumulating. Addressing technical debt incrementally within the sprint ensures that the team maintains a sustainable velocity, allowing them to deliver high-quality increments that reliably meet the Definition of Done in every iteration.

Answer

Allocate a separate sprint strictly for technical debt resolution every quarter.

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Increase the velocity estimate to account for the time needed for bug fixes.

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Escalate the issue to the Release Train Engineer to request additional team members.

Question 13

An Agile Team struggles with high technical debt because they prioritize new features over refactoring. Which SAFe Core Value should the leadership emphasize to address this?

Accepted Answer

Built-in Quality. The Core Value of 'Built-in Quality' is essential here. It mandates that quality is not an afterthought but is integrated into every step of the development process. By emphasizing this, leadership shifts the culture from 'fast-tracking' features to sustainable velocity. This matters because technical debt, if left unaddressed, exponentially slows down future delivery, erodes team morale, and eventually results in a fragile system that requires complete overhauls, wasting significant organizational resources.

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Alignment

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Transparency

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Program Execution

Question 14

A Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) team is defining the portfolio's approach to funding. They want to ensure that funding decisions are aligned with strategic themes and that value streams have the autonomy to make local decisions. Which TWO of the following are key characteristics of Lean Portfolio Management funding? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Budgets are adjusted frequently based on value delivery and changing strategic priorities.. Lean Portfolio Management funding is characterized by allocating fixed budgets to value streams for a defined period, guided by Lean Budget Guardrails, and adjusting those budgets frequently based on value delivery and strategic priorities. This approach provides autonomy and stability while ensuring alignment with strategy. Central approval of every epic, project-based funding with temporary teams, and approval of user stories are antithetical to Lean principles.

Answer

Funding is tied to individual projects with defined start and end dates, and teams are disbanded after each project.

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The LPM team approves every team's individual user stories to ensure alignment with strategy.

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Funding decisions are made centrally by the LPM team for every epic, regardless of size.

Question 15

When a portfolio is facing significant budget constraints, what is the best strategy for the Portfolio Manager to manage the Portfolio Backlog?

Accepted Answer

Prioritize work by WSJF and pause or stop lower-value initiatives.. During budget constraints, it is critical to prioritize work that offers the highest strategic value and shortest lead time to return on investment. By using objective measures like WSJF, the Portfolio Manager ensures that the remaining budget is applied to the initiatives that will have the greatest positive impact on the business. This disciplined approach prevents spreading resources too thinly, which typically results in stalled work and no value delivered.

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Reduce the scope of every active project equally to save money.

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Ask the Agile Release Trains to work overtime to finish all planned epics.

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Request a budget increase from the enterprise to avoid cutting any work.

Question 16

Refer to the exhibit. A team wants to deploy a new feature to production, but the automated deployment process is blocked by the policy shown. What is the best way to handle this?

Accepted Answer

Request a meeting with the Security Lead and Architecture Board to integrate approval into the pipeline.. The exhibit shows that the deployment policy has hard constraints requiring manual sign-offs. In SAFe, teams must operate within organizational governance while striving for continuous delivery. The team should work with the Architecture Board and Security Lead to automate these approvals or incorporate them into the workflow. This is important because it balances the need for security and architectural governance with the requirement for rapid, automated release cycles.

Answer

Bypass the policy, as it is outdated and hinders speed.

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Manually email the approvers every time the team is ready to deploy.

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Ask the Product Owner to approve the deployments instead.

Question 17

A team discovers that their integration testing takes two weeks because they wait for an external department to run the tests. What is the most effective Lean-Agile response?

Accepted Answer

Automate the tests and decentralize the execution. The most effective response is to 'Build quality in' by automating the tests and empowering the team to run them themselves. This removes the dependency on an external department and drastically reduces the integration time. By shifting from a centralized, manual process to a decentralized, automated one, the team gains the speed and feedback necessary to adhere to the Lean-Agile principle of managing queue lengths and accelerating the flow of value.

Answer

Request more headcount for the testing department

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Schedule the testing department meetings earlier in the sprint

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Accept the two-week delay as a necessary part of the process

Question 18

An Agile Release Train (ART) has just completed its first Program Increment (PI). During the Inspect and Adapt workshop, the team identifies that they struggled with cross-team dependencies. As a SAFe Agilist, what is the most appropriate guidance to help the ART improve in the next PI?

Accepted Answer

Recommend that the ART use the program board to visualize dependencies and establish a regular sync cadence to address them.. In SAFe, the program board is used to visualize dependencies and facilitate coordination across teams. Combined with a regular sync cadence, such as Scrum of Scrums and PO Sync, it helps the ART proactively manage dependencies. This approach aligns with SAFe's principles of visualizing work, applying cadence and synchronization, and fostering decentralized decision-making, thereby improving the ART's ability to deliver integrated value in the next PI.

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Advise the ART to eliminate all dependencies by reorganizing into independent teams.

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Suggest that the ART ignore dependencies and focus solely on team-level objectives to increase velocity.

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Instruct the Release Train Engineer (RTE) to assign a dedicated manager to resolve all cross-team dependencies.

Question 19

How does Lean Portfolio Management support the 'Pivot or Persevere' decision-making process?

Accepted Answer

It provides a mechanism to use data and feedback to validate the hypothesis of the epic.. The 'Pivot or Persevere' process is vital for ensuring that the portfolio does not waste resources on unsuccessful initiatives. By using objective metrics, leading indicators, and regular feedback from the Portfolio Kanban, LPM enables data-driven decisions at the end of each stage. This prevents 'sunk cost fallacy' by forcing teams to evaluate whether an epic is meeting its business hypothesis, allowing them to stop unproductive work and reallocate capacity to higher-value opportunities.

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It requires all epics to be completed within 90 days, regardless of outcome.

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It ensures that only the most senior executives can cancel an epic once it has started.

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It automatically renews the budget for every epic at the start of each fiscal year.

Question 20

A SAFe Agile Release Train (ART) is seeing Cycle Time stretch from eight to fourteen days over three Program Increments, even though each team reports being fully utilized. Work is piling up in the Product Owner's "ready" column, and reviews of finished items are being scheduled only after every dependency is resolved. What is the most likely cause of the lengthening Cycle Time?

Accepted Answer

The ART has optimized individual team utilization instead of limiting Work in Process across the full value stream.. Optimizing individual resource utilization creates local efficiency but floods the value stream with partially finished work, so items wait for the slowest step and Cycle Time grows. SAFe addresses this by visualizing the flow of features across the ART, limiting Work in Process, and reducing batch sizes so that demand stays within the system's capacity. The scenario's queues and deferred reviews are classic symptoms of unconstrained WIP.

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The Product Owner is applying weighted shortest job first when ordering the program backlog.

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The ART has not adopted a formal capacity allocation policy for enablers and features.

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The ART has too few System Team members to support continuous integration.