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.
75 questions found · page 2 of 3
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 hybrid project is developing a medical device that requires FDA approval. The hardware development follows a stage-gate process with formal reviews, while the software uses an adaptive approach with continuous integration. The regulatory affairs team has raised concerns that the adaptive software approach lacks sufficient documentation and traceability for FDA submission. The software team argues that their automated testing and version control provide better traceability than traditional documentation. The regulatory deadline for submission is in four months, and both teams are at an impasse. Delays in resolving this could jeopardize the regulatory approval timeline. What should you prioritize?
July 27, 2026
You are leading a hybrid infrastructure modernization project with a $5M budget and 18-month timeline. The cloud migration work is being executed in two-week sprints using Scrum, while the network infrastructure upgrades follow a predictive schedule due to regulatory requirements and vendor dependencies. You've established a burn-up chart for the adaptive work and an earned value management system for the predictive work. At the 9-month mark, the cloud migration is progressing well with 60% of planned story points completed, but the network infrastructure shows a CPI of 0.78 and SPI of 0.85. The infrastructure delays are now blocking three upcoming cloud migration sprints. The sponsor asks for a realistic forecast of the final cost and completion date. What should you do?
July 27, 2026
You are managing a hybrid digital transformation project where the mobile application is developed using Kanban, the enterprise integration layer uses iterative development with monthly releases, and the legacy system upgrades follow a waterfall approach. Each component has separate teams with their own quality standards. During a recent production release, a critical defect was discovered that originated from miscommunication about data format expectations between the mobile team and integration team. The mobile team followed their Definition of Done which included unit testing, but the integration team assumed end-to-end testing would catch integration issues. This is the second integration defect in three months. What is the most effective long-term solution?
July 27, 2026
Your organization is executing a hybrid project to modernize its supply chain platform. The backend API development follows Scrum methodology, while hardware procurement and installation follow a predictive approach with fixed milestones tied to vendor contracts. You've established a cadence where API sprints are two weeks, and you conduct integrated planning every six weeks. During the third integrated planning session, the product owner requests prioritizing new API features that require hardware capabilities not included in the current procurement contract. The hardware lead indicates that modifying the contract will take 8-10 weeks and increase costs by 15%. The product owner argues these features are critical for competitive advantage. How should you proceed?
July 27, 2026
You are leading a hybrid project implementing a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. The infrastructure and data migration components are being executed using predictive approaches with detailed schedules, while the user interface customization is being developed iteratively with two-week sprints. During Sprint 3, the development team discovers that database schema changes required for a new UI feature will impact the data migration timeline, which is currently on the critical path. The infrastructure team needs three weeks to implement the schema changes, but this will delay the overall project completion by two weeks. What should you do first?
July 27, 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