9.5: Full-Length PMI-ACP Style Practice Questions

Sample Questions

1. A Scrum Team is falling behind during a Sprint. The burndown chart has been flat for several days. What should the Scrum Master do first?
   1. Tell the team to work overtime until the burndown improves.
   2. Facilitate a discussion with the team to identify blockers and inspect why work is not moving to done.
   3. Hide the burndown chart from stakeholders.
   4. Assign each Developer a new task to increase activity.
2. A stakeholder asks a Developer to add an urgent feature during the Sprint. The work is not related to the Sprint Goal. What should the Developer do?
   1. Add the work immediately because stakeholders are important.
   2. Ask the stakeholder to work with the Product Owner so value, urgency, and impact can be evaluated.
   3. Reject the request permanently because Agile does not allow change.
   4. Complete the work secretly and tell the team later.
3. A team's velocity has dropped for two Sprints. A manager wants to know who caused the decline. What is the best Agile response?
   1. Identify the lowest-performing individual.
   2. Inspect the trend with the team and look for system causes such as dependencies, WIP, defects, or unclear stories.
   3. Increase story point estimates.
   4. Cancel retrospectives until velocity improves.
4. A team is unsure whether a new architecture can support expected usage volume. What should the team do?
   1. Commit to the architecture because planning is complete.
   2. Run a timeboxed spike to reduce technical uncertainty.
   3. Ignore the concern until testing at the end.
   4. Ask stakeholders to remove all performance expectations.
5. A retrospective reveals that testing happens too late in the Sprint and defects are found near the end. What is the best next action?
   1. Tell testers to work faster.
   2. Help the team identify one improvement, such as earlier testing or clearer acceptance criteria, and inspect the result next Sprint.
   3. Stop holding retrospectives.
   4. Move all testing to a hardening phase at the end of the release.
6. A support team receives unpredictable requests throughout the day. Leadership wants all teams to use Scrum because it is the company standard. What should the Agile coach recommend?
   1. Force Scrum because consistency is always more important than fit.
   2. Consider Kanban because the team's work is continuous and interrupt-driven.
   3. Stop using Agile for support work.
   4. Require all support requests to wait for the next Sprint Planning.
7. A team member raises a concern that the release may not meet compliance requirements. The Product Owner is worried this will slow delivery. What should the team do?
   1. Ignore compliance until the release is complete.
   2. Make the compliance risk visible and involve the appropriate compliance stakeholders early.
   3. Remove the compliance item from the backlog.
   4. Ask the team member not to raise concerns during the Sprint.
8. During Sprint Planning, the team waits for the Scrum Master to assign stories to each person. What should the Scrum Master do?
   1. Assign the work quickly to keep the meeting moving.
   2. Coach the team to self-organize around the Sprint Goal.
   3. Ask the project sponsor to assign the work.
   4. Cancel the Sprint.
9. A Kanban board shows that many items are stuck in review. Developers continue starting new work because they do not want to be idle. What should the team do?
   1. Increase the number of items in progress.
   2. Focus on clearing the review bottleneck before starting more work.
   3. Remove the review column from the board.
   4. Stop visualizing work.
10. A team has many defects because the Definition of Done is unclear. What is the best response?
    1. Create or improve the Definition of Done with the team so quality expectations are clear.
    2. Ask testers to catch all problems at the end.
    3. Reduce testing to increase velocity.
    4. Avoid discussing quality with stakeholders.
11. A new Agile team is experiencing disagreement about roles, priorities, and how to work together. What should the Agile leader do?
    1. Treat the conflict as a normal team development stage and facilitate constructive discussion.
    2. Disband the team immediately.
    3. Tell the team that conflict is not allowed.
    4. Ask senior management to make every decision.
12. An organization has adopted Agile tools and ceremonies, but Product Owners are not empowered and managers still assign tasks to team members. What is the likely problem?
    1. The organization is focusing on Agile practices without changing behaviors and decision-making.
    2. The organization needs more dashboards.
    3. Scrum events should be longer.
    4. Teams should stop using backlogs.
13. A customer complains that a feature technically works but does not solve the real problem. What should the team do?
    1. Mark the feature complete because the requirements were met.
    2. Collaborate with the customer and Product Owner to understand the desired outcome and adapt the backlog.
    3. Avoid customer feedback in the future.
    4. Add more features without discussion.
14. A team is under pressure to deliver more features. Technical debt is increasing, and changes are becoming slower. What should the Product Owner and team do?
    1. Make technical debt visible and balance debt reduction with feature delivery.
    2. Ignore technical debt because customers do not see it directly.
    3. Increase WIP to start more features.
    4. Remove refactoring from future work.
15. A distributed team often misses important decisions because they happen in side conversations among co-located members. What should the team do?
    1. Create working agreements for decision-making and record decisions visibly.
    2. Continue side conversations because they are efficient.
    3. Exclude remote members from planning.
    4. Stop documenting decisions.
16. A transformation effort is failing. Teams received training, but they do not have time, coaching, tools, or leadership support to apply the new way of working. Which change ingredient is most clearly missing?
    1. Resources.
    2. Velocity.
    3. Sprint length.
    4. Story points.
17. A Product Owner accepts every stakeholder request, and the Product Backlog has become a long list of unrelated items. What should the Product Owner do?
    1. Continue accepting all requests to keep stakeholders happy.
    2. Order the backlog based on value, Product Goal, risk, and stakeholder input.
    3. Ask Developers to choose all priorities.
    4. Remove stakeholders from all future conversations.
18. A Sprint Review is being used only as a slide presentation. Stakeholders do not see working product. What should the Scrum Team do?
    1. Use the Sprint Review to inspect the actual increment and gather feedback.
    2. Cancel Sprint Reviews because they take time.
    3. Send only written status reports.
    4. Wait until the final release to show the product.
19. A team's cumulative flow diagram shows that the Testing band is widening. What does this suggest?
    1. Testing may be a bottleneck.
    2. The team has no work.
    3. Velocity is automatically improving.
    4. The Product Backlog is empty.
20. A manager asks the team to skip the retrospective because the project is behind schedule. What is the best Agile response?
    1. Skip it because improvement can wait.
    2. Keep the retrospective focused and identify one improvement that may help the team deliver better.
    3. Replace it with an individual performance review.
    4. Cancel all future retrospectives.