EXIN Agile Business Professional flashcards

31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Agile Manifesto values

Four stated preferences: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan.

Empirical process control

A control model for complex work based on three pillars: transparency of the process and its results, frequent inspection of them, and adaptation when the result deviates outside acceptable limits.

Growth mindset

The belief that ability and intelligence are developable through effort, feedback, and strategy. It underpins willingness to run retrospectives, experiment, and expose learning gaps.

Cynefin complex domain

A sense-making framework domain where cause and effect are visible only in hindsight. The appropriate response pattern is probe, sense, respond, using safe-to-fail experiments rather than best-practice planning.

Lean waste (muda)

Any activity consuming resources without creating customer value. Examples in software delivery include waiting, handoffs, partially done work, and rework caused by defects.

Agile principles

Twelve principles that operationalize the Manifesto values, including early and continuous delivery of value, welcoming changing requirements, self-organizing teams, and regular reflection on how to become more effective.

Cargo cult Agile

Adoption of Agile ceremonies and vocabulary without the underlying beliefs or behavioural change. It produces the visible rituals but none of the responsiveness the practices were meant to create.

Mindset versus method

Methods are the observable practices; the mindset is the beliefs that make those practices coherent. A method transplanted onto incompatible beliefs reverts to the old behaviour under pressure.

Psychological safety

The shared belief within a team that raising concerns, admitting mistakes, or asking questions will not be punished. It predicts learning behaviour and honest retrospectives.

Servant leadership

A leadership stance in which the leader's primary job is to grow people and remove impediments, rather than to direct tasks or control detailed work allocation.

Self-managing team

A team that decides internally how to organize its work and, within the given goal, what to work on. External direction supplies the goal, not the task assignment.

Facilitator neutrality

The facilitator manages the process, participation, and outcomes of a session but does not contribute content or steer the decision, so the group retains ownership of its result.

Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes

Five conflict-handling modes defined by assertiveness and cooperativeness: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Collaborating suits decisions that need full commitment and information.

Working agreement

An explicit, team-authored set of norms covering communication, availability, quality, and decision rules. It is reviewed and updated when observed behaviour drifts from the agreement.

Retrospective decision step

The final stage of a retrospective in which the team selects a small number of concrete, owned improvements. Omitting it turns the ritual into a complaint session with no adaptation.

Culture as leader signals

Culture follows what leaders measure, reward, and tolerate. An incentive contradicting a stated value will override the value in practice.

Distributed team protocols

Explicit agreements on channels, response times, meeting cadence, and where decisions are recorded. They replace the informal osmotic communication that collocated teams take for granted.

Team charter

A document stating a team's purpose, boundaries, stakeholders, and ways of working. It makes implicit expectations explicit and gives the team a reference when conflicts arise.

Business value

The worth an increment delivers to the organization and its customers, expressed as outcomes such as revenue, cost avoided, risk reduced, or satisfaction improved. It is not output volume.

WSJF

Weighted Shortest Job First: cost of delay divided by job duration or size. Prioritizing the highest ratio maximizes value delivered per unit of time.

Cost of delay

The economic impact of not delivering an item on time. It combines expected value, time criticality, and risk reduction or opportunity enablement, estimated on a common relative scale.

Little's Law

Average number of items in a system equals arrival rate multiplied by average time in the system. With stable throughput, cutting work in progress cuts cycle time proportionally.

Cumulative flow diagram

A stacked chart of work items per state over time. A widening band indicates a stage where work accumulates, identifying the current constraint in the value stream.

Process efficiency

Value-adding time divided by total lead time. Delivery systems commonly measure single-digit percentages, meaning most elapsed time is waiting rather than work.

Definition of Done

A shared checklist that determines when an increment is complete and releasable. It prevents 'done' from meaning merely 'code complete' and protects delivered quality.

Outcome over output

Measuring changes in customer or business behaviour, such as adoption or satisfaction, instead of counting features shipped. Output metrics can rise while value stays flat.

Value realization point

The moment an increment reaches the customer and begins producing benefit. Work held before that point carries cost but no realized value.

Scaling frameworks

Structures such as SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, or Nexus that coordinate many teams on one product. They add coordination mechanisms and cannot compensate for weak team-level capability.

Change curve

The predictable sequence from skepticism through resistance to acceptance and commitment. Resistance is treated as information about system constraints rather than as personal opposition.

Agile PMO

A project management office reframed from gatekeeping to enabling: publishing flow metrics, funding value streams, and removing policy constraints that block delivery.

Community of practice

A voluntary group sharing a craft across teams. It spreads knowledge horizontally, outlives reorganizations, and complements rather than replaces team-level learning.