SAFe-SASM SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM) Questions and Answers

The Scrum of Scrums meeting during PI Planning is designed to identify and manage dependencies across teams. This meeting allows representatives from each team to come together and discuss how their plans intersect and where they might impact each other.

Dependency Identification:Teams identify dependencies early to manage risks and align their efforts.

Coordination:Facilitates better coordination and integration of work between multiple teams.

Communication:Provides a forum for raising issues and ensuring that all teams are aware of potential impacts on their work.

This helps in creating a more cohesive and integrated approach to delivering the Program Increment (PI).

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe Advanced Scrum Master Training Material, Chapter on PI Planning​​

Promoting T-shaped skill development means encouraging team members to develop a broad set of skills in addition to their specialization. This enhances team flexibility and resilience.

Pairing on Stories (A):By having team members pair up on stories, knowledge is shared, and members can learn from each other’s expertise. This practice helps in building secondary skills and fosters a collaborative learning environment.

Cross-Functional Stories (E):Defining stories that require cross-functional skills ensures that team members have to work together, leveraging and developing a broader range of skills. This practice helps in cross-training and builds a more versatile team.

These methods help in breaking down silos within the team and promote a culture of continuous learning and skill development.

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe Advanced Scrum Master Training Material, Chapter on Team Dynamics and Collaboration​​​​​​.

Identify Impediments:

Purpose:The Scrum of Scrums meeting helps identify and address impediments that affect multiple teams. This ensures that these blockers are resolved quickly, allowing teams to continue their work without disruptions.

Process:Representatives from different teams come together to discuss challenges, share updates, and seek assistance in removing impediments.

Facilitate Cross-Team Collaboration:

Purpose:The meeting fosters collaboration among teams working on the same product or solution, ensuring that their efforts are aligned and integrated.

Process:Teams share their progress, dependencies, and upcoming work, enabling better coordination and synchronization across the Agile Release Train (ART).

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe highlights the importance of the Scrum of Scrums meeting for coordinating efforts and solving cross-team issues, ensuring that the ART functions smoothly and efficiently.

An effective Agile Team focuses on delivering value by reliably deploying features that meet customer needs.

Value Delivery:The primary measure of success for an Agile team is the continuous delivery of valuable, working software.

Customer Focus:Teams work collaboratively to understand and deliver what is most valuable to customers.

Incremental Progress:Regularly delivering increments of the product that are potentially shippable ensures continuous feedback and improvement.

This characteristic emphasizes the Agile principle of delivering working software frequently, with a focus on customer value.

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe Advanced Scrum Master Training Material, Chapter on Agile Teams​​.

Cadence:Refers to a regular, predictable schedule that sets the rhythm for the team or ART (Agile Release Train) activities. It helps in aligning planning, development, and delivery cycles.

Synchronization:Ensures that multiple teams or ARTs work together in harmony, aligning their schedules, dependencies, and delivery efforts.

Benefit Explanation:Having both cadence and synchronization means that all teams within the ART are working in a coordinated manner, iterating together. This alignment ensures that dependencies are managed, integration happens regularly, and the system evolves cohesively.

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe promotes cadence and synchronization to manage complex dependencies and ensure that all parts of the system evolve together, enhancing overall system integrity and quality.

Creating a buffer state between two states in a Kanban board can help regulate the flow of work and address the varying completion times.

Buffer State Purpose:Acts as a holding area to balance the flow between different stages of work, smoothing out variances in completion times.

Flow Regulation:Ensures that work can continue smoothly without bottlenecks or idle times.

Work In Progress (WIP) Limits:Helps maintain a steady flow by preventing too much work from accumulating in any one state.

This approach aligns with Lean principles of managing flow and reducing variability in processes.

SAFe Scrum Master References:

SAFe Advanced Scrum Master Training Material, Chapter on Kanban Systems​​.

One of the primary outputs from the problem-solving workshop in SAFe is identifying the top improvement items for the next Program Increment (PI). These workshops focus on analyzing issues, determining root causes, and formulating actionable improvements. By prioritizing and committing to these improvement items, teams can systematically address problems and enhance their performance and productivity in subsequent PIs.

The primary measurement during the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event in SAFe is the program predictability measure. This metric assesses the Agile Release Train's (ART) ability to deliver on its commitments within a Program Increment (PI). It helps teams understand how accurately they can plan and execute work, providing a basis for continuous improvement. By focusing on predictability, organizations can improve their planning processes, align better with business objectives, and ensure more reliable delivery of value.

Achieving Continuous Deployment involves several practices, one of which is decoupling deployment from release. This means that code can be deployed to production continuously and automatically, but it is only released to end-users when it is appropriate. Decoupling these processes allows for more frequent and reliable deployments without affecting the user experience until the features are ready for release. This practice helps in maintaining system stability and enabling faster feedback loops.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe Continuous Delivery Pipeline: practices for Continuous Deployment

SAFe 5.0 framework: decoupling deployment and release for continuous improvement

One way a Scrum Master can gain the confidence of a stakeholder is by making the process visible. Transparency is a key principle in Agile and SAFe, as it builds trust and ensures that stakeholders are well-informed about the progress, challenges, and successes of the team. By making the process visible through tools like information radiators, progress charts, and regular updates, the Scrum Master can demonstrate accountability, foster open communication, and build stakeholder confidence in the team's ability to deliver value.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe Principles: transparency and visibility

SAFe 5.0 framework: building stakeholder confidence through visible processes

Two specific anti-patterns likely present within the team's retrospectives are:

The team identifies improvements but is not allowed to address them (B): This anti-pattern occurs when the team discusses potential improvements but lacks the authority or support to implement them. This leads to frustration and a sense of futility, as the team feels their efforts in retrospectives do not result in meaningful change.

The team does not identify and commit to improvement items for how they do their work (C): Effective retrospectives should result in actionable items that the team commits to addressing in the next iteration. If the team fails to identify and commit to these improvements, the retrospective becomes an empty ritual without real impact on the team's performance or processes.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe Principles: continuous improvement and the importance of retrospectives

SAFe 5.0 framework: best practices for effective retrospectives

The first step a team should take to feed potential problems into the Problem Solving workshop is to analyze quantitative and qualitative metrics. These metrics provide objective data about the team's performance and can highlight areas where issues may be occurring. By reviewing these metrics, the team can identify trends, pinpoint specific problems, and prioritize them for discussion in the Problem Solving workshop. This approach ensures that the workshop focuses on data-driven issues, leading to more effective and targeted solutions.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe 5.0 framework: importance of data-driven decision-making and problem-solving

SAFe Advanced Scrum Master learning materials: analyzing metrics for continuous improvement

Phase-gate milestones are traditional project management mechanisms that mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another. One major problem with phase-gate milestones is that they assume a point solution exists and can be built correctly the first time. This assumption does not account for the iterative nature of Agile methodologies, where solutions are developed incrementally and iteratively, with feedback loops and continuous improvement. Assuming a point solution can be finalized early often leads to rigidity, lack of adaptability, and higher risks of delivering a product that does not meet the actual needs or expectations.

Teams that fear conflict exhibit certain characteristics that can hinder their success:

They ignore controversial topics that are critical to team success (B): When teams avoid addressing difficult or controversial issues, they miss out on resolving important problems that could impact their success. Ignoring such topics can lead to unresolved conflicts, misalignment, and suboptimal decision-making.

They fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team members (C): Fear of conflict can prevent team members from voicing their opinions and sharing diverse perspectives. This lack of open communication can result in missed opportunities for innovation and improvement, as well as decisions that do not reflect the collective wisdom of the team.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe Principles: fostering a culture of open communication and collaboration

The program predictability measure is the primary metric used during the quantitative measurement part of the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event in SAFe. This measure assesses how reliably the Agile Release Train (ART) can deliver business value within the Program Increment (PI) timebox. It helps to:

Evaluate the team's ability to meet their commitments.

Identify areas where predictability can be improved.

Ensure that the business value planned for the PI is actually delivered.

By focusing on the predictability of business value, organizations can better align their planning and execution efforts, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and achieving strategic goals more effectively.

SAFe Scrum Master References

SAFe Inspect and Adapt events

SAFe 5.0 framework: using program predictability as a key metric to assess and improve ART performance.