Practice Questions
PMP Practice Questions
Scenario-based questions aligned with the 2026 PMP Exam Content Outline. All questions reviewed by a certified PMP before publishing.
70 questions found · page 1 of 3
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
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
You are the project manager for an agile marketing campaign development team. During sprint planning, the team has identified 15 user stories they believe they can complete based on their average velocity of 40 story points per sprint. However, two team members will be on vacation for one week during this three-week sprint. The total story points for the 15 stories equal 40. What should the team do?
August 16, 2026
Your organization is transitioning to agile and you are leading your first Scrum project. At the end of the first sprint, the team has completed 80% of the committed user stories, but none of them fully meet the Definition of Done due to incomplete testing. The product owner is pressuring you to accept the stories as done so they can be demonstrated to stakeholders. What should you do?
August 16, 2026
You are facilitating a daily standup for your agile development team. One team member mentions they are blocked because they are waiting for access to a testing environment that requires approval from the IT security team. This is the third day this issue has been raised. The team member asks what they should work on while waiting. What should you do as the Scrum Master or agile project leader?
August 16, 2026
Your agile team is planning their next iteration. During the planning session, team members are estimating user stories using story points. A new developer on the team asks why the team uses story points instead of estimating in hours or days. The team lead explains that story points help with relative sizing. What is the primary benefit of using story points for estimation in agile projects?
August 16, 2026
You are managing a software development project using Scrum. The team has just completed their second sprint and the product owner wants to see what has been developed. Several features have been coded and unit tested, but integration testing is still pending. The product owner asks when they can review the completed work. What should you do?
August 16, 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
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