Free Practice Questions for Scaled Agile SAFe-Agilist Exam

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The System Team is a specialized Agile team that:

Builds and maintains development environments

Provides infrastructure and tooling support

Supports continuous integration (CI), test automation, and system-level testing

Helps ARTs integrate and validate their work

This makes the System Team the correct answer.

(Source: Scaled Agile Framework – System Team)

Lean Portfolio Management, Agile Product Delivery, and Lean-Agile Leadership are SAFe core competencies. A SAFe core competency is a set of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that enable an organization to achieve business agility. Business agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative solutions. There are seven core competencies in SAFe: Team and Technical Agility, Agile Product Delivery, Enterprise Solution Delivery, Lean Portfolio Management, Organizational Agility, Continuous Learning Culture, and Lean-Agile Leadership. References: SAFe as an Operating System for Business Agility, Core Competencies of Business Agility

The workbook lists multiple benefits of SAFe and Agile adoption including:

“Faster time-to-market” and “Ability to respond to changing priorities” are consistently shown as primary motivators in SAFe case studies and business agility metrics.

Deploy, verify, monitor, and respond are all activities of Continuous Deployment. Continuous Deployment is one of the elements of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, which is a key enabler of Agile Product Delivery. Continuous Deployment means automatically releasing every update to a production environment or a staging environment that is identical to production. Continuous Deployment involves four activities: deploy (releasing the solution to the target environment); verify (ensuring that the solution meets the quality standards and acceptance criteria); monitor (collecting feedback and data on the solution performance and usage); and respond (taking actions to improve or fix the solution based on the feedback and data). References: Agile Product Delivery, Continuous Delivery Pipeline, Continuous Deployment

Lean Portfolio Management is responsible for managing the Portfolio Kanban. The Portfolio Kanban is a method for visualizing and managing the flow of portfolio epics from ideation to implementation and completion. The Portfolio Kanban helps align strategy with execution, prioritize demand with capacity, reduce cycle time and variability, and foster collaboration and feedback. Lean Portfolio Management is one of the core competencies of business agility in SAFe. Lean Portfolio Management aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. References: Lean Portfolio Management, Portfolio Kanban

The workbook section on the Program Board notes:

“ART Planning Board Legend: Blue – Features; Red or Pink – Significant Dependency”

These visual elements are used during PI Planning to show feature delivery timelines and cross-team dependencies.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Page 4-58

Under the “Team and Technical Agility” competency, the workbook details:

“Built-in Quality ensures that every element and increment of the solution reflects quality standards throughout development.”

This competency supports Agile practices such as pairing, automation, and Definition of Done to embed quality at every level.

Source: 01 Workbook SA (6.0).pdf, Pages 3-13 to 3-15

SWOT and TOWS are used to brainstorm potential portfolio future states. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. SWOT analysis is a tool that helps identify the internal and external factors that affect the portfolio’s performance and position in the market. TOWS is an acronym for Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Strengths. TOWS analysis is a tool that helps generate strategic alternatives based on the SWOT factors. SWOT and TOWS help create a portfolio vision that reflects the desired future state of the portfolio. References: SAFe Portfolio, Portfolio Canvas

According to the SAFe Agilist 6.0 domain of Lean Thinking, a value stream is triggered by a demand for some value, such as a new feature, a change request, or a defect fix1. A feature is a service that fulfills a stakeholder need2. Therefore, a feature request is a valid trigger for a value stream.

A spike request is a type of exploration enabler that addresses technical uncertainty or risk3. A user story request is a type of backlog item that represents an end user goal or function4. These are not triggers for a value stream, but rather work items that flow through a value stream.

SAFe Principle #10 emphasizes:

“Organize around value” and states that enterprises must continuously adjust their organizational structure to optimize for the flow of value when market demands change.

This means reorganizing the network around the new value flow is the recommended approach.