Scrum Master Certification Day 6 Q/A Review: Product Planning, Agile Estimation & Fibonacci Sequence

In this post, we will be sharing the Day 6 live session review with the FAQs of Scrum Master Certification Day 6 Training which will help you in understanding the Product Planning, Product vision, Product RoadMap, MMF, MVP, Estimation in Agile, And Estimation in Techniques.

The previous week, In Day 5 Live Session, we have covered the basic concepts of Scrum Scrum Master Certification which will help you in understanding the Product Owner Roles, Development team Roles, Roles & Responsibilities, Servant Leadership, Facilitation & Coaching.
In Day 4 Live Session, we have covered the basic concepts of Scrum Scrum Master Certification which will help you in understanding the five scrum ceremonies/events like Sprint, Sprint Review, Daily Scrum, and a brief overview of MoSCoW.
In Day 3 Live Session, we have covered the basic concepts of Scrum Scrum Master Certification which will help you in understanding three Scrum Artifacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment and concepts of User stories.

So, here we discuss some Q/A’s asked during the Live session from Module 7: Product Planning,  and Module 8: Agile Estimation & Fibonacci Sequence.

Product Planning

Product Planning is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product’s feature set. It serves as the basis for decision-making about price, distribution, and promotion

Question 1: What is a product vision?
Answer: The Product Vision captures the shared understanding of the goal that is to be achieved with building the product. It is created by the Product Owner (often in collaboration with other involved parties) and guides the Scrum Team(s). It is similar to a North Star indicating where you want to go without the details on how to get there.

Question 2: What is a product roadmap?
Answer: A product roadmap is a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time. Product owners use roadmaps to outline future product functionality and when new features will be released. When used in agile development, a roadmap provides crucial context for the team’s everyday work and should be responsive to shifts in the competitive landscape.

Question 3: What do you understand about Scope Creep? How can Scope Creep be managed?
Answer: Scope creep describes how a project’s requirements tend to grow over time, such as when a single deliverable product gets split into five or when a product with three essential features needs ten essential features or when the customer’s needs change midway through a project, prompting a reassessment of the project requirements. Scope creep is frequently caused by changes in project requirements from key stakeholders, as well as internal miscommunication and conflicts.
Controlling scope creep through a change control procedure is the key to managing scope creep. This entails:

• Keeping track of the project’s progress and establishing a baseline scope
• Using variance analysis to compare actual work performance metrics to the baseline scope, i.e., “How different is the present project from the initial plan?”
• Identifying the source and severity of the observed changes
• Choosing whether corrective or preventive action is required in response to change requests
• Using the Perform Integrated Change Control procedure, manage all change requests and recommended actions (whether corrective or preventive).

Question 4: What is the product vision board?
Answer: The product vision board helps you describe, visualize, and validate your product vision and strategy. It captures the target group, user needs, key product features, and business goals. The extended Vision Board also describes key elements of your business model including competitors, revenue sources, cost factors, and channels.

Question 5: What is an MVP?
Answer: An MVP or a Minimum Viable Product is a concept from the agile scrum that refers to a product that has just enough features to satisfy the needs of early customers and, more importantly, give them something to provide feedback on to shape the future of the product. The real value of an MVP lies in the learning opportunities it provides. Instead of jumping the gun and creating all the features you think users want in a single iteration (a process that’s lengthy and prone to errors), you do it in “sprints” or stages and you learn as you go.

Question 6: What is MMF?
Answer: The full term Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) is not used widely in practice, however, the concept lines up nicely with the first principle behind the Agile Manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” The concept supports the idea that software you release to your customer, even if you’re doing it frequently should provide some added benefit and allow your customer to accomplish something they weren’t able to before.
The term marketable describes the idea that the feature provides value to the customer. Because value can be defined in a variety of ways including increasing or protecting revenue and reducing or avoiding costs, the MMF concept is applicable to both external products (intended for sale outside the organization) and internal products (for use inside the organization to support the delivery of the organization’s products and services).

Question 7: What is the difference between MMF & MVP?
Answer: Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a Lean Startup concept that emphasizes the importance of learning while developing a product. This enables one to test and understand the concept by exposing target consumers and users to the initial version. To accomplish this, one must first gather all pertinent data and then learn from it. The MVP concept is to create a product, provide consumers access to it, and observe how the product is used, perceived, and understood. This will also give you a better idea of what the needs of your clients or users are.
Successful products are released into the market in stages over time, with each “significant” deployment referred to as a release. An MMR (Minimum Marketable Release) is a product release with the minimal possible feature set that solves your customers’ current new needs. MMRs are used to shorten time-to-market between releases by condensing each release’s coherent feature set to the lowest increment that provides new value to customers.

Question 8: What is a Scrum Burndown Charts?
Answer: The Scrum Burndown Chart is a visual measurement tool that shows the completed work per day against the projected rate of completion for the current project release. Its purpose is to enable the project is on the track to deliver the expected solution within the desired schedule.

Question 9: What is Velocity?
Answer: The rate of progress of a Scrum Team is called “velocity”. It expresses the amount of e.g. story points completed per iteration. An import rule for calculating the velocity is that only stories that are completed at the end of the iteration are counted. Counting partially finished work (e.g. coding only – test missing) is strictly forbidden.

Question 10: What does a burnup chart represent?
Answer: A burnup chart is a visual diagram commonly used on Agile projects to help measure progress. Agile burnup charts allow project managers and teams to quickly see how their workload is progressing and whether project completion is on schedule. A burnup chart is a graph that shows project progress over time. There are two main lines shown on the chart: one for the total project work planned, and the other for tracking the work completed to date.
By comparing the work your team has accomplished so far with the total amount of work planned, you can understand how efficiently they’re working and better estimate how long it will take to complete the work remaining

Agile Estimation

Agile estimation is the project management mechanism used to derive an idea about the costs and effort involved in executing a project. This helps in deciding whether the work can be undertaken as proposed, needs to be modified, or should be cancelled.
It helps for proper planning, management, and estimation of the total efforts that will be required to implement, test & deliver the desired product to the customers in terms of time within the specified deadlines.

Question 11: How is agile estimation different from traditional estimation?
Answer: Traditional estimation is a different ballgame and uses methods that follow ‘bottom-up’ estimating which means that teams inspect each element of a project, estimate the hours or days required to complete it, and then use this information to develop a schedule for the project.
Agile estimation techniques use a ‘top-down’ process. This encourages teams to propose a gross-level estimation for how long the project should take, or how much effort it will take. This is then broken up and applied to different elements of the project. Teams drill farther into those elements, uncovering more and more details until the task level – which is looked at through a just-in-time lens.

Question 12: What are the benefits of Agile Estimation?
Answer: Some of the benefits of Agile Estimation techniques include:

• Better Coordination
• Improved Decision-Making
• Better Risk Management

Question 13: What are the Agile Estimation phases?
Answer: When a project starts, the horizon is limited. Thus, it is wise to implement a short product discovery phase to tide over this problem. The discovery phase establishes the essential tenet of Agile methodology, which consists of breaking down the requirements into small batch sizes. The basic process includes:

• Conducting Stakeholder Interviews
• Defining high-level product backlog
• Understanding client & potential customers
• Prioritize requirements
• Prepare Minimum Value Product (MVP) backlog
• Estimating the project cost & timeline

Question 14: What are some common and most popular Agile Estimation techniques?
Answer: Some popular estimation techniques are:

• Planning Poker/Sprint Poker
• Analogy
• T-shirt size estimation
• Dot Voting
• Affinity Mapping/Estimation
• Bucket System Estimation
• Fibonacci Sequence

Question 15: What are the use-cases of the Fibonacci sequence technique?
Answer:  Fibonacci sequence is a popular scoring scale within some teams. This sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers in the series- 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89… and continued whereas the linear sequence is- (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.).
This comes with its benefits. While looking at a story and determining whether it’s a 5, 8, or 13, it’s quicker and easier to land with an answer than trying to come up with the correct number between, say, 4-15. The team is likely to reach a consensus much more quickly.
The team will have to discuss the work and choose the best estimate from a limited set of options.
The options, however, can still be limited. For example, a story could be estimated as more effort than 34 but less than 55. In instances like these, this scale has chances of being less accurate.

Use-Cases:

• When estimating for large and complex tasks
• If the need is to prevent estimates from getting too close to each other
• Are concerned about the estimated accuracy

Question 16: Who is involved in Agile estimation?
Answer: Agile estimation techniques should not be implemented by a product owner or a scrum master alone instead everyone on the Agile development team should be involved because collaborative efforts lead to better estimates.

Quiz Time (Sample Exam Questions)!

With our Scrum Master Certification Training Program, we cover 150+ sample exam questions to help you prepare for both Certified Scrum Master & Professional Scrum Master certifications.
Check out one of the questions and see if you can crack this…

Ques: Scrum does not prohibit documentation, but it values working software more – True or False?

A. True
B. False

Comment with your answer & we will tell you if you are correct or not!

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