Work in Progress Limit

Correct Answer: Advocate for starting with a conservative WIP limit to ensure focus and quality, then adjust based on team capacity and retrospection insights.

In Scrum and Kanban, the purpose of setting Work In Progress (WIP) limits is to ensure that the team focuses on completing tasks before taking on more work, thus avoiding multitasking and ensuring better quality and predictability in the delivery. Starting with a conservative WIP limit allows the team to get a sense of their capacity and adjust based on actual performance and insights gathered during retrospectives. Increasing sprint length, setting individual WIP limits, or removing them altogether may lead to a loss of focus, lower quality, and reduced team predictability, which does not align with Agile principles of sustainable pace and continuous improvement.

Correct Answer: Prioritize the backlog items based on value and the team's capacity aligning it with the WIP limit.

The best practice is to prioritize the backlog items based on value and the team's capacity aligning it with the Work In Progress (WIP) limit. WIP Limits are put in place to ensure that the team is not overcommitted and can maintain a sustainable pace of work. Asking the team to work overtime is not a long-term solution and could lead to burnout, thus it's not the recommended approach. Increasing the WIP limit or removing the WIP limit may seem like quick solutions, but they do not address the root of the problem, which is an overloaded backlog. Without prioritization, items of lower value may be worked on before more important, high-value items, leading to less efficient use of time and resources.

Correct Answer: Introduce the task only after ensuring it doesn't affect the agreed sprint scope and engage team in workload balancing in such a way it respects the WIP limit.

The best approach when a critical task is identified mid-sprint that must be addressed immediately, is to first ensure that this task does not affect the agreed sprint scope. This is important as it could disrupt the commitment made by the team at the start of the sprint. Then, the Scrum Master should engage the team in workload balancing in order to ensure the Work In Progress (WIP) limit is respected. This approach ensures that the task is added in a way that minimizes disruption to the team's workflow and maintains the integrity of the sprint. The other answers are incorrect. Increasing the WIP limit to accommodate the new task can lead to teams overburdening themselves leading to decreased quality and burnout. Ignoring the WIP limit and allocating the task to a team member can undermine the purpose of the limit which is to ensure focus and manage workflow. Asking the product owner to remove another task from the sprint backlog to make space for the new task without negotiating this with the team can disrupt their agreed upon work and commitments.