Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK)

Correct Answer: The team needs to limit its Work In Progress (WIP) and refine Product Backlog Items further for clarity.

The best action for a Scrum Team maintaining high quality but struggling to meet their sprint goals would be 'limiting their Work In Progress (WIP) and refining Product Backlog Items further for clarity'. This approach of managing workflow with an emphasis on limiting WIP is a key principle of the Kanban method. This encourages the team to complete existing work before taking up new work, thereby ensuring tasks are completed promptly. More clarity in Product Backlog Items will remove potential roadblocks during the development phase, which also aids in timely task completion. As for the other answers: - 'Maintain the status quo as the quality is high': Quality is important, but the team is not meeting its sprint goals, indicating a need for change. High quality doesn't compensate for lack of timely delivery. - 'Reduce the Sprint length to impose more pressure': Simply reducing the sprint length and imposing pressure is unlikely to solve the issue if the team is already struggling to meet goals. It may increase the stress and burnout thereby affecting quality. - 'Increase the team size to complete more tasks': Merely adding more people to a team doesn't necessarily increase productivity and can create additional coordination overhead.

Correct Answer: Work with your team to conduct a root cause analysis of what's preventing these work items from moving to 'Done', then implement necessary improvements.

The best approach is to 'Work with your team to conduct a root cause analysis of what's preventing these work items from moving to 'Done', then implement necessary improvements.' This is in line with the principles of Professional Scrum with Kanban principles, which emphasize continuous improvement and addressing workflow bottlenecksTransferring the problem to the operations department is not a solution as it does not identify or address the root cause of the issue and it is against the principles of Scrum, where the self-organized team owns the whole process of product deliveryRemoving the 'Ready for Deployment' stage from the Kanban board is not practical as it won't solve the problem as well, but will mask itLimiting the input of work items into the workflow to decrease the number in 'Ready for Deployment' might solve the problem temporarily, but in the long term, it won't fix potential issues with the team's capability or capacity to handle the work.

Correct Answer: Leverage 'Swarming' to focus multiple team members on getting the Testing items done and limiting work in progress.

Leveraging 'Swarming' to focus multiple team members on getting the Testing items done and limiting work in progress is the most reasonable and expedient solution. This is a Kanban principle that aims at eliminating bottlenecks. It ensures the workflow is smooth and optimizes time and effort. Moreover, it helps in improving the productivity of the team by facilitating cross-functional behavior. On the other hand, increasing the capacity of the 'Testing' stage would only delay the actual problem rather than solving it properly. Ignoring the issue assuming it will self-adjust is not a responsible or effective way to handle this situation; problems, especially in this context, rarely get self-adjusted. Finally, moving some items back to the 'Development' stage to make space in 'Testing' is not advisable as it would disrupt the workflow, cause unnecessary rework and delay in delivery without any guarantee that this won't happen in future.