Eliminate Waste

Correct Answer: Establish clear meeting objectives and keep the meetings focused and purposeful.

By establishing clear objectives and keeping meetings focused, the waste of time is minimized. Other options either avoid meetings entirely, make them less efficient, or rely on punitive measures.

Correct Answer: Focus on delivering valuable increment and include the customer in determining what is valuable.

The best solution to eliminate waste related to unnecessary feature development is to involve the customer in decisions about what is valuable. This means the team focuses on delivering increments that are valuable from the customer's perspective. This approach ensures alignment with the customer's needs and wants, thereby minimizing the risk of wasted effort on irrelevant features. This is following the Agile principles of customer collaboration and responding to change. The answer 'Remove the customer from meetings to prevent their involvement' contradicts these principles, thereby making it incorrect. The option 'Increase the sprint duration to allow for more comprehensive feature development' is also incorrect because increasing the sprint duration won't necessarily solve the problem of wasted resources on unnecessary features. Instead, it might just provide more time for the team to develop more of these unwanted features Lastly, the suggestion to 'Ask the team to work extra hours to recreate the unnecessary features' would only add to the waste, not reduce it. Forcing the team to work extra hours can lead to burnout and ultimately, decreased productivity and quality.

Correct Answer: Implement Test-First Development and involve the testers in the early stages of each Sprint

The best way to eliminate the issue of high priority features getting stuck in the testing stage, causing delay and overproduction, would be to 'Implement Test-First Development and involve the testers in the early stages of each Sprint'. This approach allows testing to be incorporated into each development phase, ensuring that problems are detected and fixed sooner, thus minimizing wastes and delays. 'Delegate testing to an external team' does not solve the issue as it does not address the bottleneck in the testing phase itself, and it may introduce additional coordination and communication issues, resulting in even more delays. 'Skip testing for high-priority features' is not a viable solution, as this would compromise the quality of the high-priority features, which could lead to serious issues in later stages, possibly negating the value of the feature altogether. Likewise, 'Increase the testing team size significantly' might help in the short term, but it does not address inefficiencies in the process. Larger teams may face difficulties coordinating, leading to diminished productivity, and this response does not address the root cause, which is the bottleneck in the testing phase.