What you will learn in our Agile Training
Our firm has provided Agile Team Training and other Agile courses for over eight years to clients in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. From those training, we have created a list of 40 questions we have answered to provide you with a sense of what you will learn during the training.
Most of the agile training we provide is for companies who are doing software development or clients whose management has decided an agile methodology will help them satisfy customers better and accelerate time to market. We do offer our course as an instructor-led online course or in person. An agile certificate of completion is provided on the last day of the training.
Top 40 questions from past students answered during training
1. How can you deliver on time if you are always iterating? When is the project done? What is the role of the project manager?
2. The rework is such a waste of time…where is the value there?
3. How do we get leadership on side to implement Agile Scrum?
4. How do we create a business case for an Agile project if it’s built in small pieces? Is there such a thing as agile project management? How will this impact our other project management approaches?
5. It Seems like Story Points are not tangible enough and don’t relate to time, so how do you estimate the size of something without knowing the time measurement?
6. How do you use an agile method to develop a ‘Thin slice that operates end to end’ in a complex system with many dependencies, it seems impossible.
7. Is automated regression testing a requirement of Agile Scrum?
8. How does Agile Scrum work when people wear a lot of hats?
9. What do you do if team members are not collocated at the same location and office?
10. If there is one thing that you can suggest to get to high-performance teams, what is it?
11. What projects and organizations are a good fit for Agile Scrum? How do we manage software design in an iterative environment?
12. Are there parts of the Agile Scrum process you can get away with not following and others you absolutely can’t avoid?
13. What is the role of the tester on the team? What does the tester do while the developer is coding the software, wait?
14. I don’t see much documentation happening in this process. What is documented?
15. Why are Sprints time boxed into 1-4 week periods? What is the purpose? What is the value?
16. How do you determine how long your sprints should be?
17. What do you do when you are in a Sprint Planning meeting and you realize the User Story is much larger than you thought? Who will manage all the projects when we learn agile?
18. Since we are thinking in terms of ‘just enough,’ does that mean the product is tested ‘just enough’ How can quality be higher in an Agile project?
19. Who should be the Product Owner? Who makes a good Product Owner?
20. Should there be one Product Owner for each team? What if one person can’t make the decisions, we have a Product Owner committee.
21. How do you choose who will be the Scrum Master?
22. What happens if you have time available at the end of a Sprint?
23. What happens if you can’t complete all the work in a Sprint, is that failure?
24. How do you deal with situations where you are mid-sprint and something comes up which makes you change direction and/or if something urgent comes in?
25. How do you start with agile in a silo-based organization where development wants to do agile but other areas do not?
26. How do you keep stand-up meetings short? Our meetings go way past 15 minutes.
27. Is there a general best time of the day to have the stand-up meeting?
28. How do we confirm what is not in scope? Because it’s not in the acceptance criteria?
29. How do we manage acceptance criteria when a User Story is split, reference the other User Story or build new acceptance criteria?
30. What happens if you realize you missed acceptance criteria during a Sprint planning meeting?
31. How do you develop a release plan with Agile Scrum?
32. What do you do if the Product Owner is not creating good user stories? For example, you realize they forget important things? Do you add them, or how do you deal with it?
33. How do we capture the ‘extras’ the business wants when we are mid-Sprint?
34. Do you ever end a Sprint with a task that no one chooses to do? We worked on a project, and no one wanted to do it. What do we do in this case?
35. What do you do about defects? Would you assign a separate team or put them into the main sprint team? How do the agile manifesto and Agile principles deal with this?
36. Does the project team care about missed estimates when reporting in the daily scrum meeting?
37. Who is accountable for the time spent? What if a team member is behind? Should I have a spreadsheet to track time spent vs time, they said they would spend?
38. How do we report on variances on the Burn Down chart so that information is available for the Retrospective?
39. Do you adjust your velocity if things outside your control always happen, like environments are not available?
40. What does a small company do when the teams need to focus on a wide range of projects at one time?