Agile Frameworks and Methodologies

A. Fixed, well-understood requirements and a fixed-price contract suit a predictive life cycle, where the work is planned once and executed to the specification. Iterating would add cost without producing any learning.

B. The deliverable and its format are known in advance and delivered once. This is definable work with low uncertainty, the classic case for a predictive approach.

C. Requirements are uncertain, change is expected and feedback arrives after each release. That is the high-uncertainty, high-change situation in which an adaptive approach delivers value in small increments and adjusts the backlog as the clinics learn.

D. A short, repeatable task done to a proven procedure has no requirement uncertainty to resolve. Iterations and feedback loops would bring nothing, so a predictive plan fits.

A. Adaptive approaches depend on rapid decisions about value and priority. A product owner who is present every day answers questions, accepts work and reorders the backlog without waiting for a committee, and for a team split between offices that presence matters even more.

B. The scrum master is a servant leader who removes impediments and coaches the team; work is pulled by self-organising team members, not assigned. A scrum master who assigns work undermines the self-organisation the approach relies on.

C. A product owner exists, but quarterly feedback defeats the point of short iterations: the team would build for months without knowing whether the increment is right. Feedback has to arrive at least once per iteration.

D. These are organisational process assets that support a predictive life cycle. Phase gates and detailed schedule templates add ceremony an adaptive team does not use, so they do not facilitate the approach.

A. The product goal is the longer-term objective the whole product backlog works toward, spanning many sprints. The objective proposed for one sprint is a step toward it, not the goal itself.

B. The sprint backlog is the set of items the team selects plus its plan for delivering them. It is built to serve the objective; it is not the objective.

C. The definition of done states the quality conditions every item must meet before it counts as complete. It applies to all sprints and does not describe what one particular sprint sets out to achieve.

D. The sprint goal is the one objective the sprint commits to, agreed in sprint planning. It gives the team a shared purpose and guides which items are selected and how scope is negotiated during the sprint.

A. Work packages describe deliverables, so they map naturally to features and user stories. Placed in a product backlog and ordered by value they become the input from which the team pulls work into each iteration and the product owner reprioritises as learning arrives.

B. Uses agile vocabulary but keeps the predictive idea of committing the entire scope up front. A sprint backlog holds only what the team forecasts for one timebox; the rest waits in the product backlog and can still change.

C. A Gantt chart of fixed activities is predictive tracking. The iteration review inspects a working increment with stakeholders; reporting percent complete against a schedule there mixes the two approaches without gaining any adaptability.

D. Phase gates are a predictive control that delivers nothing usable until the end of each phase. Adaptive planning works from a value-ordered backlog and delivers increments, not sequential gated phases.

A. Critical-path schedule variance assumes a fixed network of activities agreed in advance. With the backlog reordered every iteration there is no stable activity network to measure against, so the variance would describe a plan that no longer exists.

B. Remaining size is half the picture. Without the rate at which the team finishes points it cannot say when the backlog will be exhausted, so it does not answer whether the date holds.

C. Effort spent is an input measure; it says nothing about how much accepted, working product exists or how much remains. Adaptive tracking measures completed value, not hours consumed.

D. Velocity is the amount of work the team actually completes per iteration. Plotted with the remaining scope on a burnup chart it projects when the backlog will be done and shows scope changes as they happen, which is what the sponsor's question needs.

A. The ordered list of everything the product may need is the central planning artifact of an adaptive project. Every iteration is planned from it and it changes as the product owner learns.

B. A schedule network diagram fixes activity sequences and float for the whole project in advance. It belongs to predictive scheduling; adaptive teams plan one iteration at a time from the backlog.

C. A traceability matrix links a fixed set of requirements to design, build and test through a predictive project. In an adaptive project requirements live as backlog items with acceptance criteria and are expected to change, so the matrix is not a standard artifact.

D. A burndown chart shows the work remaining in an iteration or release against time. It is one of the standard visual artifacts adaptive teams use to track progress and keep it visible.

E. Phase gates close one phase before the next begins, which is a predictive life-cycle control. Adaptive projects replace them with iteration reviews of a working increment.

A. Acceptance criteria are the conditions specific to one story that the product owner uses to accept it, and the stem says they were satisfied. They are necessary but not sufficient; the story fails a team-wide condition instead.

B. The sprint review is the event where the increment is inspected with stakeholders. It is a meeting, not the rule that decides whether an item counts as complete before it reaches that meeting.

C. The definition of done is the shared list of quality conditions that every item must meet regardless of its individual acceptance criteria. An untested story does not meet it, so it cannot be counted as complete or included in the increment.

D. The sprint goal is the objective the sprint commits to. It shapes which items are selected, but it does not define the quality state an item must reach to be counted as complete.

A. Sprint planning opens the sprint: the team sets the sprint goal and selects backlog items. It looks forward at what to build, not back at what was built.

B. The sprint review closes the sprint's work by inspecting the increment with stakeholders and adapting the product backlog; it is the feedback event that keeps the product on track.

C. The retrospective inspects how the team worked, its process, tools and relationships, and plans improvements. It is held by the Scrum team without stakeholders and does not examine the product increment.

D. The daily scrum is a short event for the developers to inspect progress toward the sprint goal and plan the next day. It is internal to the team and happens every day, not at the end of the sprint.

A. WIP limits are the defining practice of the Kanban method, used to expose bottlenecks and improve flow. They are not part of XP's practice set, although a team may choose to add them.

B. Pair programming is a core XP practice: continuous review as the code is written, shared knowledge across the team and fewer defects.

C. Program increment planning is a component of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which coordinates many teams on a shared cadence. XP is a single-team method and has no such event.

D. The sprint review is a Scrum event. XP works in short iterations too, but the sprint and its formal review are Scrum's vocabulary, not XP's.

E. Test-driven development is a core XP engineering practice: the test defines the behaviour first, then the code is written to satisfy it and refactored.

A. A shorter timebox is a legitimate Scrum adjustment, but the fixes arrive daily, so even a one-week commitment would still be broken. It treats the symptom by planning more often rather than matching the method to interrupt-driven work.

B. The scrum master is a servant leader who coaches the team and removes impediments; assigning work is not the role. It also leaves the mismatch between fixed sprint commitments and unpredictable arrivals untouched.

C. Kanban's flow model suits work that arrives unpredictably: there is no fixed-scope timebox to break, WIP limits keep the team from overloading, and each item is pulled when someone is free, so fixes and planned items share one visible flow.

D. Protecting the sprint goal is Scrum by the book, and the product owner does decide priority, but production fixes on a live billing system cannot wait for the next timebox. The rule is being applied against the value it exists to protect.

A. Velocity is a planning measure for forecasting how much the team can take on. It varies naturally, and a rising velocity says nothing about whether what was built is usable or valuable.

B. Started work is partially done work. Adaptive approaches count only completed, accepted items as progress; ten half-finished stories deliver no value and cannot be inspected at the review.

C. Spending the budgeted effort is an input measure inherited from predictive tracking. It measures consumption, not the outcome the iteration set out to achieve.

D. Success in adaptive delivery is a done, potentially usable increment that achieves the objective the team committed to, confirmed by the product owner's acceptance at the review. That is the criterion the iteration was planned against.

A. Seniority is not priority. Taking work directly from a stakeholder bypasses the product owner, breaks the sprint's forecast and invites every stakeholder to route requests to whichever developer they know.

B. The product owner is the single point of prioritisation and orders the backlog by value; the developer's job is to route the request there. If the product owner judges it more valuable than current sprint work, the sprint scope can be renegotiated with the developers.

C. A formal change request through a change control board is the predictive reflex. In an adaptive project change is absorbed through the backlog, not a board; the product owner decides, quickly, without a gate.

D. Swapping an item is a legitimate way to adjust a sprint, which makes this tempting, but the scrum master neither orders the backlog nor decides sprint scope. That decision belongs to the product owner with the developers; asking the scrum master to make it misplaces the role.