PMP Practice Questions

During a sprint review, stakeholders see the completed user stories demonstrated but express concern that the features don't align with current market conditions, which have shifted significantly in the past month. The product owner acknowledges the market has changed but states that the product backlog was carefully prioritized at the project start and changing it now would be disruptive. The stakeholders request immediate changes to the roadmap. How should the team respond?

August 24, 2026

An agile project team has been using story points and velocity for sprint planning. After six sprints, a new team member joins who is much more experienced than the rest of the team and significantly increases productivity. The team's velocity jumps from an average of 32 points per sprint to 48 points. The product owner sees this increase and immediately adds more items to the upcoming sprint based on the new velocity. However, two weeks later, the experienced team member accepts a position at another company. What should the team have done differently?

August 24, 2026

A cross-functional agile team is developing a customer portal. After four sprints, the cumulative flow diagram shows that items are moving from 'In Development' to 'In Testing' quickly, but there is a growing bottleneck in the testing column, with an average of 12 items waiting for test completion while only 3-4 items are in development at any time. The testers report they are working at full capacity. What should the team do?

August 24, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application project. During the sprint retrospective, team members report that they consistently cannot complete all planned story points because unexpected production support issues from a legacy system consume 30-40% of their capacity each sprint. The product owner is frustrated with the reduced velocity and wants the team to commit to more story points. What should the scrum master do first?

August 24, 2026

Your Scrum team has a definition of done that includes code review, unit testing, and deployment to the staging environment. During sprint planning, the team realizes that one of the high-priority user stories will require changes to the production database schema, which according to organizational policy requires a change control board (CCB) approval that typically takes 5-7 business days. The sprint is only 10 business days long. What is the best approach?

August 24, 2026

A cross-functional agile team is developing a new customer portal. After the third sprint review, the product owner realizes that while the delivered features meet the acceptance criteria, the overall user experience is fragmented and doesn't align with the original product vision. Individual stories were completed successfully, but they don't work together cohesively. The team followed all agile ceremonies and the definition of done. What is the most likely root cause of this issue?

August 11, 2026

A product development team is working in two-week sprints. During sprint planning for Sprint 5, the product owner presents 15 user stories that they want completed. The development team's historical velocity is 35 story points, but the 15 stories total 52 story points. The product owner insists all stories are critical for an upcoming trade show demo in four weeks. Team members are concerned about committing to work they cannot complete. What is the best course of action?

August 11, 2026

During a sprint, your development team discovers that a technical dependency on a third-party API integration is more complex than originally estimated. The story was estimated at 5 points but will actually require approximately 13 points of effort. This story is critical to the sprint goal, but completing it will require the team to remove other committed work from the sprint. The daily stand-up is happening in one hour. What should the team do?

August 11, 2026

Your agile team has been delivering consistent increments every two weeks for six months. A new senior stakeholder joins the project and requests a detailed Gantt chart showing all remaining features with specific completion dates for the next six months. The product owner is concerned this stakeholder may not understand the agile approach. The stakeholder has significant influence over project funding. How should you respond to this request?

August 11, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application development project. During the sprint retrospective, several team members express frustration that they are frequently interrupted by stakeholders asking for status updates and clarifications on features. The product owner mentions that stakeholders feel disconnected from the project progress. The team's velocity has dropped by 15% over the last two sprints. What should the Scrum Master do to address this situation?

August 11, 2026

An agile team working on a financial services application has maintained a consistent velocity of 28-32 story points over the past six sprints. During Sprint 7 planning, the team estimates several user stories and realizes they are consistently giving higher estimates than in previous sprints for similar work. When asked, team members mention they are concerned about upcoming regulatory requirements that might require rework, though the specific requirements won't be finalized until next quarter. The Product Owner is concerned that velocity is decreasing. What should the team do to address this situation?

July 7, 2026

A cross-functional agile team is building a data analytics platform. During Sprint 6, a critical production bug is discovered in functionality delivered two sprints ago that is affecting customer reporting. Fixing the bug will require approximately 13 story points of effort. The current sprint backlog contains 32 story points of planned work, matching the team's average velocity. The Product Owner wants to add the bug fix to the current sprint without removing any planned stories. What should the Scrum Master recommend?

July 7, 2026

An agile team is developing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. After the fourth sprint, the Product Owner reviews the increment during the sprint review and realizes that several features don't match what key stakeholders envisioned. The stakeholders are present and express concern that the product is heading in the wrong direction. The development team is frustrated because they built exactly what was described in the user stories. The team's definition of done includes code review, testing, and documentation. What is the most likely root cause of this issue?

July 7, 2026

A software development team is working on an e-commerce platform using two-week sprints. During sprint planning for Sprint 5, the Product Owner presents 15 user stories totaling 55 story points. Based on their velocity from the last three sprints (average: 34 story points), the team knows they cannot complete all stories. The Product Owner insists all stories are critical for an upcoming trade show demo in four weeks. The team is concerned about committing to work they cannot complete. What is the best approach for the team to take?

July 7, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application project. During the sprint retrospective, several team members express frustration that they are spending too much time in meetings and not enough time developing features. The Scrum Master notes that the team is attending daily standups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, sprint retrospectives, and several ad-hoc meetings called by stakeholders. Velocity has declined from 32 story points in Sprint 1 to 21 story points in Sprint 3. What should the Scrum Master do first to address this issue?

July 7, 2026

You are facilitating a project using a hybrid approach where requirements are gathered upfront but development occurs in two-week iterations. After four iterations, the team's velocity has been inconsistent: 28, 15, 32, and 18 story points respectively. The team reports that some iterations include significant work on technical infrastructure that doesn't directly relate to user stories but is necessary for the architecture. The project sponsor is concerned about the unpredictable pace and asks why the team cannot maintain consistent velocity. How should you address this situation?

June 7, 2026

During the eighth sprint of a twelve-sprint project to build an e-learning platform, your team completes a sprint review. The product owner and key stakeholders attend the demonstration, and while they acknowledge the functionality works as specified in the acceptance criteria, they express concern that the user interface is more complex than they expected. They mention that teachers, the primary users, may struggle to navigate the system without extensive training. The team followed the user stories and acceptance criteria exactly as written. What should happen next?

June 7, 2026

Your Kanban team is experiencing flow problems on a data migration project. The team's board shows 15 items in the 'In Progress' column, 8 items in 'Code Review', and only 3 items in 'Done' over the past two weeks. Team members report feeling overwhelmed and context-switching frequently between multiple work items. Lead time for items has increased from an average of 5 days to 12 days. The team lead suggests adding more people to help clear the backlog. What is the most appropriate action to improve flow?

June 7, 2026

You are leading a Scrum team developing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. During sprint planning, the product owner presents a high-priority user story estimated at 21 story points, which exceeds the team's average velocity of 35 points per two-week sprint. The product owner insists this feature is critical for an upcoming sales conference in three weeks and must be completed in the next sprint. Several team members suggest breaking down the story, but the product owner argues that all components must be delivered together to be valuable. How should you proceed?

June 7, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application development project. During the sprint retrospective, team members express frustration that they frequently discover integration issues late in the sprint when merging code. These issues require significant rework and have caused the team to miss their sprint goals in two of the last three sprints. The team asks for your guidance on how to address this recurring problem. What should you recommend?

June 7, 2026

Your development team has been consistently achieving their sprint goals for the past four sprints with a stable velocity of 30 story points. In sprint planning for the next iteration, the team commits to 30 points of work. However, by mid-sprint during the daily standup, it becomes clear that three critical stories are blocked due to an unexpected production outage requiring immediate team attention. The team estimates they can only complete 18 points this sprint. What should the scrum master do?

May 29, 2026

Your scrum team is working on a healthcare application where regulatory compliance is critical. During the sprint, a team member discovers that a completed story from the previous sprint doesn't meet new HIPAA requirements that were recently clarified by the compliance department. The feature is already in the staging environment and was demonstrated to stakeholders. The Definition of Done includes 'meets all regulatory requirements,' but this specific requirement wasn't known during development. What should the scrum master facilitate?

May 29, 2026

During a sprint review, stakeholders see the completed user stories but express disappointment that the features don't match their expectations. The team followed the acceptance criteria precisely, and all stories meet the Definition of Done. The product owner approved the stories during backlog refinement two weeks ago. Stakeholders now request significant changes that would require reworking most of the sprint's output. What is the most appropriate next step?

May 29, 2026

You are facilitating sprint planning for a new feature that involves complex data migration. The development team estimates the work at 34 story points, but the sprint capacity is only 28 story points based on historical velocity. One developer suggests reducing quality checks to fit everything into the sprint, while another proposes splitting the migration into smaller, independently deliverable chunks. The product owner is concerned about delaying the feature launch. How should you proceed with sprint planning?

May 29, 2026

Your agile team has completed three sprints of a mobile application development project. During the retrospective, team members report that they consistently struggle to complete stories because dependencies on a third-party API team cause delays. The API team works in a different department and follows a waterfall approach with monthly release cycles. Several stories have been carried over to subsequent sprints, affecting the team's velocity. What should the product owner do to address this impediment?

May 29, 2026