PMP Practice Questions

Your organization is transitioning a large, multi-year infrastructure program to agile delivery. The program consists of five interdependent product teams, each running two-week sprints. After three program increments, dependencies between teams are causing frequent delays—Team A cannot complete their sprint commitments because they're waiting for API specifications from Team B, while Team C's database changes block Team D's integration testing. The program board shows 47 active dependencies across teams. Teams are becoming frustrated with blocked work and declining morale. What approach would best address these systemic dependency issues?

September 9, 2026

An agile team developing a healthcare platform has maintained consistent velocity at 38 story points for six consecutive sprints. During the retrospective, technical debt items are repeatedly raised but never addressed because the product owner prioritizes new features to maintain competitive advantage. The lead architect warns that accumulated technical debt is increasing the time required for new features by approximately 30%, and estimates two full sprints would be needed to address critical technical debt. Code quality metrics show increasing defect rates and decreasing test coverage. What is the most appropriate action?

September 9, 2026

A distributed agile team across four time zones is developing an API integration platform. During the daily standup conducted via video conference, developers in the Asia-Pacific region consistently remain silent or provide minimal updates. The product owner mentions that several critical defects discovered by APAC developers were not communicated until the weekly status report, causing a two-day delay in resolution. Team velocity metrics show APAC contributions are significantly lower than other regions despite having equal headcount. What is the most effective approach to improve team collaboration and information flow?

September 9, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application project. The product owner consistently adds new acceptance criteria during sprint reviews, claiming these represent newly discovered customer needs. The team's velocity has dropped from 45 to 28 story points, and team members are frustrated with rework. The product owner insists all changes are critical for market competitiveness. Sprint planning for the next iteration is scheduled for tomorrow. What should the Scrum Master do first to address this situation?

September 9, 2026

During the eighth sprint of a financial services product, a regulatory compliance requirement emerges that affects the system's data retention architecture. The compliance officer estimates implementation requires 320 hours of effort, equivalent to four full sprints of the eight-person team's capacity. The product owner has a committed release date in six sprints to support a major client contract worth $2.3M annually. The current product backlog contains 180 story points of features promised for this release. The team's average velocity is 45 story points per sprint. How should the team approach this situation?

September 9, 2026

Your organization is implementing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) across five agile teams working on an integrated product. During PI (Program Increment) Planning, the teams identified 23 dependencies between them. After three sprints, only 30% of planned features are completed because teams are waiting on each other. The Release Train Engineer asks you, as one of the Scrum Masters, how to address the delivery delays. Analysis shows that eight dependencies are technical integration points, ten are related to shared specialist resources, and five involve sequential work that cannot be parallelized. What is the most effective approach to improve flow?

September 2, 2026

You're leading an agile transformation initiative in a financial services company. After six months, eight teams are running sprints, but several dysfunctions have emerged: teams are consistently achieving 100% of sprint commitments but stakeholders report little business value is being delivered; sprint retrospectives focus on minor process tweaks rather than substantive improvements; technical debt is accumulating rapidly with no plan to address it; and teams report they're afraid to raise impediments because previous attempts resulted in blame from management. Velocity metrics are stable and high. Senior management considers the transformation successful based on these metrics. What is the most critical issue to address?

September 2, 2026

Your agile project team is developing a medical device software component that requires FDA regulatory approval. You're using two-week sprints with a definition of done that includes unit tests, integration tests, and code review. The regulatory affairs department insists that no code can be released to production without completing a validation protocol that takes 6-8 weeks and costs $50,000 per validation cycle. Marketing is pressuring for faster feature delivery to respond to competitive threats. The team is frustrated because completed increments sit unreleased for months. How should you adapt your agile approach to balance regulatory compliance with agile principles?

September 2, 2026

Your agile team has been delivering increments every two weeks for six months. The product owner recently left the company, and a new product owner has joined who has minimal agile experience. During the last three sprint reviews, the new product owner has been rejecting completed stories that meet all acceptance criteria, stating they don't align with their vision. The team's velocity has dropped by 40%, and morale is declining. Stakeholders are concerned about the lack of accepted deliverables. What should the Scrum Master do first to address this situation?

September 2, 2026

Your distributed agile team spans three time zones (San Francisco, New York, and London) with 3-4 members in each location. After four sprints, several patterns have emerged: the London team members are disconnected from decisions made during daily standups that occur at 9 AM Pacific; sprint planning sessions run 4-5 hours as teams debate estimates and approach; and sprint reviews lack engagement because stakeholders in Europe attend at 7 PM their time. The team's definition of done includes peer code review, but reviews are delayed 12-16 hours waiting for reviewers in other time zones. One team member has suggested abandoning agile practices in favor of a more asynchronous waterfall approach. What strategy would most effectively address these distributed team challenges?

September 2, 2026

Your agile team is building a healthcare platform that must comply with HIPAA regulations. The compliance officer insists on reviewing and approving all designs before development begins and all code before deployment, which creates a bottleneck taking 5-7 days per review. The team's sprint cycle is two weeks, and this delay means most stories cannot be completed within a sprint. The compliance officer is unwilling to attend daily standups or sprint ceremonies, stating they are too busy. Team morale is declining as they cannot meet sprint goals. What is the MOST effective approach to resolve this situation?

August 24, 2026

Your agile team has been working on a financial services application for three sprints. During the sprint review, the product owner asks the team to demonstrate a complex regulatory reporting feature that was not part of the sprint backlog. The team lead explains they focused on the agreed sprint goal instead. The product owner becomes frustrated, stating this feature is critical for an upcoming audit and should have been obvious to include. Stakeholders at the meeting appear concerned about the team's ability to deliver. What should the Scrum Master do to address this situation?

August 24, 2026

You are leading a distributed agile team working on an IoT platform across three time zones. The team uses Kanban with WIP limits, and throughput has been consistent at 12 items per week. Recently, a major enterprise client requested a committed delivery date for a specific feature set, which your sales team communicated would take four weeks. The product owner asks you to guarantee this timeline and wants daily status reports to track progress. Your team has historically avoided commitments because of the variability in item complexity. How should you respond to this request while maintaining agile principles?

August 24, 2026

An agile team is delivering a customer-facing mobile application using two-week sprints. After six sprints, velocity has been stable at 40 story points per sprint, but customer satisfaction scores are declining. Analysis shows that while features are being delivered on schedule, they often require significant rework in subsequent sprints after user feedback. The product owner has been accepting all stories that meet the acceptance criteria at sprint reviews. Technical debt is accumulating, and the team's Definition of Done includes unit testing and code review but no user validation. What is the BEST approach to improve customer satisfaction?

August 24, 2026

An agile team working on a cloud migration project has been using story points for estimation with planning poker. After 10 sprints, a new senior developer joins who strongly advocates for switching to ideal hours instead of story points, arguing that hours are more precise and easier for stakeholders to understand. The team is divided—some members agree with the new developer, while others want to keep story points because their historical velocity data would become irrelevant. The upcoming sprint planning is in two days, and the product owner is concerned about any changes that might impact the team's predictability during a critical release cycle. What should you do?

August 24, 2026

Your agile team is developing a mobile healthcare application in a regulated environment. During sprint planning for sprint 8, the product owner presents user stories for a new patient data-sharing feature. The team identifies that implementing this feature requires integrating with a legacy hospital system that has unreliable APIs and poor documentation. Past experience shows that such integrations typically reveal unknown dependencies mid-sprint. The product owner insists this feature is critical for a partnership announcement in four sprints and must begin now. The team is concerned about committing to a sprint goal they may not achieve. What approach best balances the business urgency with empirical process control?

August 4, 2026

You are coaching an agile team that has achieved high performance, consistently delivering 55-60 story points per sprint with minimal defects. The organization's PMO has mandated that all teams adopt a new estimation approach using ideal hours instead of story points, claiming this will enable better cross-team resource planning and executive reporting. Your team objects strongly, arguing that story points reflect their shared understanding and that converting to hours will reduce their estimation accuracy. The PMO has set a deadline of two sprints to transition. Senior management supports the PMO initiative as part of portfolio-level standardization. What should you do?

August 4, 2026

Your product team is in sprint 6 of developing an AI-powered analytics platform. The product backlog contains 180 stories, and the product owner has been prioritizing based on business value scoring. During backlog refinement, the technical lead warns that continuing to build features on the current data architecture will create massive refactoring work later, potentially requiring 4-6 sprints to address. However, stakeholders are eager to see new analytics capabilities demonstrated at an industry conference in five sprints. The technical lead proposes dedicating the next two sprints entirely to architectural improvements with no visible features. How should you guide the product owner's decision?

August 4, 2026

You are leading an agile transformation for a distributed team building a customer portal. After three sprints, you notice that the team's velocity has dropped from 45 to 28 story points, and sprint goals are consistently not met. During daily standups, team members report blockers related to waiting for architectural decisions from a centralized enterprise architecture group that reviews designs every two weeks. The product owner is frustrated with slow progress and wants to add more developers. Team morale is declining as members feel they cannot control their outcomes. What is the most effective approach to restore the team's ability to deliver value?

August 4, 2026

Your agile team has been delivering increments for a regulatory compliance product over the past four sprints. During the sprint review, the compliance officer raises concerns that while individual features work well, the product lacks end-to-end workflow validation required for regulatory approval. The product owner argues that all acceptance criteria were met and signed off. Stakeholders are now questioning whether the product will pass the mandatory audit in two sprints. The team has velocity data showing consistent delivery, but no integrated compliance testing has been performed. What should you do first to address this situation?

August 4, 2026

Your agile project has been using relative estimation with story points for six months. A new senior stakeholder joins and demands to know exactly when specific features will be delivered, expressing frustration with 'vague agile estimates.' They insist the team provide hour-based estimates and commit to fixed delivery dates for features, stating that their previous projects always worked this way successfully. The team's velocity has been stable at 30-35 points per sprint, and they have a well-groomed backlog. The stakeholder threatens to escalate to executive leadership if you cannot provide 'real project management.' How should you respond?

July 20, 2026

During a sprint retrospective, your team identifies that they spent 40% of the sprint fixing production defects that escaped from previous sprints rather than working on new features. The team proposes adding a 'quality sprint' every third sprint where they do no new development and only focus on fixing technical debt and improving test coverage. The product owner objects, stating this will reduce feature delivery by 33% and jeopardize committed roadmap dates. The team argues they cannot maintain quality with the current pace. How should you facilitate resolution of this conflict?

July 20, 2026

Your organization is running multiple agile teams working on different components of an integrated product. Each team has its own product owner who prioritizes their component backlog independently. During integration testing, you discover that Team A built a feature assuming a specific API structure, while Team B simultaneously changed that API for their own feature—neither team coordinated. This is the third time in two months that integration issues have occurred due to lack of coordination. The teams meet their individual sprint goals but integrated product releases are delayed. What is the MOST effective solution?

July 20, 2026

You are leading an agile transformation for a product team that has just completed their third sprint. The Definition of Done (DoD) requires automated testing, code review, and deployment to staging environment. During sprint planning, the team consistently over-commits because they estimate story points based on development effort only, not accounting for DoD activities. As a result, several stories are left incomplete each sprint, with testing and code review pushed to the next sprint. Technical debt is accumulating, and the product owner is frustrated with low velocity. What is the BEST approach to address this situation?

July 20, 2026

Your agile team has been working on a mobile application for six sprints. During the latest sprint review, the product owner suddenly realizes that a core feature the team built in Sprint 3 doesn't align with the evolving market needs discovered through recent customer interviews. The feature took considerable effort to build and is technically sound, but customer feedback indicates it provides minimal value. The product owner wants to remove it from the product and pivot to features customers actually need. Some team members are resistant, feeling their work was wasted. What should you do as the Scrum Master?

July 20, 2026