124 free PMI ACP practice questions from the CertStash pack of 497, each with the correct answer and a full explanation. The rule is the same for every exam: ten free on the product page, 124 free here, all 497 in the pack, and each step includes the one before it.
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Question 1
A newly formed development team experienced difficulty with accurately estimating product backlog items. As a result, the team failed to deliver all of the features in the sprint backlog for the past two iterations.
What should the team do to improve the accuracy of their estimates?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Discuss estimating techniques in the daily scrum meeting
Estimation accuracy improves when the developers who own the estimates talk openly about how they estimate and learn from what happened. A new team that missed its forecast twice should raise the problem as a team, compare how items were sized, and agree on a better technique such as relative sizing with reference stories or planning poker. Surfacing the concern when the team synchronizes, and following up in a short conversation among the developers, keeps the fix inside the team and builds shared understanding. The other choices change constraints or create pressure without improving how the team actually estimates.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Shrinking the sprint until the backlog fits hides the estimating problem and breaks the stable cadence needed to learn velocity.
- C. Adding people until the work fits disrupts the team and does nothing to make its estimates more accurate.
- D. Tying estimates to performance evaluation encourages padded, defensive estimates and erodes trust and transparency.
Question 2
Midway through a sprint, the scrum master identifies that reassigning a certain task could help the team meet its sprint's goals.
What should the scrum master do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Have the sprint proceed as planned
In Scrum the developers own the sprint backlog and decide among themselves who works on which task. A scrum master who steps in midway through a sprint to rearrange task assignments takes over a decision that belongs to the team and weakens its self-management. The servant-leader response is to let the sprint proceed as planned and trust the developers to inspect their progress toward the sprint goal at the daily scrum, where they adapt their own plan whenever they see the need. The scrum master supports that process rather than steering task allocation.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Declaring the sprint goal at risk and drafting an alternative plan oversteps the scrum master role and creates alarm without cause.
- B. Seeking buy-in for changes the scrum master has already chosen is directing the team's work rather than serving it.
- D. Prompting the team to rule on a specific reassignment still has the scrum master initiating task allocation, which the developers manage for themselves.
Question 3
During the iteration planning of a newly onboarded agile team, the product owner adds a set of high priority user stories into the iteration backlog.
What should the team do first to define the tasks needed to implement the user stories?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Self-organize
Once the product owner has placed the priority stories into the iteration backlog, the developers self-organize to work out how the stories will be delivered. They break each story into tasks together, discuss approach and dependencies, and let members pull work according to skills and capacity. Self-organization is the agile expectation for a team at any stage, including a newly formed one, and it builds shared ownership of the iteration plan. No outside party assigns tasks, and the planning meeting already has the people it needs.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Assigning tasks to each person is command and control and replaces the team pulling work collectively.
- C. Clarifying needs comes through the product owner in refinement and planning, and it is not the first step in defining tasks.
- D. The scrum master role is established before planning, and identifying it does nothing to define the tasks.
Question 4
A project's first iteration contains item A, and its second iteration contains item B. The first iteration is behind schedule, which will impact the second iteration.
Since items A and B are similar, a team member suggests beginning the design of item B.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Escalate the issue to the customer, and obtain their approval before starting the design of item B
Starting the design of item B now would pull work from the second iteration into a first iteration that is already behind, changing the order and focus of the work. Decisions about priority and sequencing belong to the customer, represented by the product owner, not to an individual team member. The agile practitioner should bring the delay and the proposal to the customer transparently and obtain agreement before starting item B. This keeps the customer informed about the schedule impact, respects their ownership of priorities, and ensures the team works on what the customer values most.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Deferring without involving the customer leaves them unaware of the delay and denies them the decision about how the work should be ordered.
- B. Starting the next item unilaterally while the current iteration is late increases work in progress and bypasses the customer's control of priorities.
- D. A change control board is a heavyweight predictive control that does not fit how an agile team collaborates with its customer on work order.
Question 5
An Agile team is under pressure to deliver an application. The product owner anticipates many change requests from customers once the product is released.
What should the agile team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Continuously work with the product owner to do backlog refinement and product reviews
Agile teams welcome changing requirements, even late, and handle them by working closely with the product owner throughout delivery. Continuous backlog refinement lets incoming change requests be clarified, sized, and ordered by value, while frequent product reviews show customers working increments and gather feedback early. Many changes are absorbed before release instead of piling up afterward, and the team keeps delivering the most valuable items under pressure. Collaboration and short feedback loops are the agile answer to expected change, not tighter upfront control.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Demanding reviews from the product owner is adversarial and ignores ongoing collaboration and refinement of the backlog.
- C. Detailed upfront specifications assume requirements are fixed, which conflicts with the expected flow of change.
- D. Committing to fixed specifications locks in scope that the product owner already expects customers to change.
Question 6
During iteration planning, it was determined that an epic should be decomposed.
What was the determining factor?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Size and priority
An epic is split when it is too large to finish within a single iteration and when its priority means part of it must be delivered soon. Size determines whether the work can fit an iteration and be completed to the definition of done, and priority determines which slices of the epic are worth pulling forward now. Breaking the epic into smaller user stories lets the team deliver the highest-value pieces first and defer the rest. These two factors together drive the decision during planning.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Minimum marketable features describe release content and do not by themselves trigger splitting an epic during iteration planning.
- C. The release plan is shaped by decomposed stories rather than being the factor that forces decomposition.
- D. Sprint mapping is not a recognized agile criterion for deciding when to split an epic.
Question 7
What should a scrum master do when one team member falls behind in their tasks?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Privately offer the team member encouragement to meet task commitments
When one team member falls behind, a servant leader first supports that person rather than exposing or bypassing them. A private conversation offering encouragement protects psychological safety, shows that the scrum master is on the member's side, and gives the member room to mention any obstacle that the scrum master can then help remove. This approach motivates the individual to meet the commitments they made to the team while preserving their dignity and the trust within the team. Public or directive responses risk embarrassing the member and discouraging openness in the future.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Moving the task to someone else is the scrum master assigning work, which undermines both the member and the team's self-organization.
- B. Putting one person's delay before the whole team before speaking with them can embarrass the member and damage psychological safety.
- D. Notifying the product owner escalates a minor individual matter that the scrum master can support directly.
Question 8
A newly formed scrum team wants to foster an environment for transparency and experimentation. The team decides to use a Kanban board to record and track encountered impediments. Emphasis is placed on how issues are resolved and the strategies for preventing them in the future.
Over time, what will be the result of this approach?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Kaizen
Kaizen is the Lean practice of continuous, incremental improvement. The team makes impediments visible on a Kanban board, studies how each one was resolved, and develops strategies to stop it from recurring. Repeating that cycle of making problems visible, learning from them, and adjusting the way of working produces a culture of ongoing small improvements over time, which is exactly what Kaizen describes. Transparency and experimentation are the conditions that allow this improvement to take hold.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. SMART goals are a way of writing objectives, not the result of tracking and preventing impediments.
- C. Key performance indicators are measures of performance, not the improvement culture this practice produces.
- D. Muda is Lean waste, which the practice aims to reduce rather than create.
Question 9
A mature agile team welcomes a new member. Due to poor experiences with a previous team, the new member is reluctant to communicate.
What should the agile project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Privately work with the new member to address any impediments
The new member is reluctant to communicate because of poor experiences on a previous team, so trust must be rebuilt before the member will speak freely in a group. A servant leader meets privately with the member, listens, and works with them to address any impediments they face. A one-on-one setting removes the pressure of an audience, shows that the leader genuinely cares about the member's concerns, and demonstrates through action that raising impediments leads to help. That foundation of trust allows the member to integrate into the mature team over time.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Raising the member's impediments publicly before trust exists puts them on the spot and deepens the reluctance.
- B. Promising that input is valued and then staging a demonstration in a group meeting still exposes a reluctant member before trust has been built.
- C. Handing the member to a senior leader adds hierarchy and focuses on productivity rather than on the member's trust and impediments.
Question 10
During a sprint, the team encounters a technical problem that becomes an impediment to completing two stories.
What should the scrum master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Create a collaborative team environment so that the team can explore a solution together
A scrum master serves the team by removing impediments and by creating the conditions for the team to solve problems itself. When a technical issue blocks two stories, the right move is to foster a collaborative setting in which the developers explore options together, for example through a focused working session or swarming. The team holds the technical knowledge and owns how the work is done, so collective problem-solving produces a better solution, spreads learning, and keeps the current sprint moving.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Relying on a lead developer creates a bottleneck and cuts the rest of the team out of the solution.
- B. Handing the problem to a manager or architect takes ownership away from the self-managing team.
- C. Pushing the investigation to the next sprint leaves the current stories blocked and delays value.
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Question 11
An agile practitioner wants to communicate the effect of technical debt on the project.
What should the practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Log technical debt as an impediment
To communicate how technical debt affects the project, the practitioner makes it explicit and visible by logging it as an impediment. An impediment is something slowing the team down, and accumulated debt does exactly that by reducing velocity and raising the cost of change. Recording it puts the debt in front of the team, the product owner, and stakeholders, where its impact can be discussed openly and its removal prioritized against new features. Visibility is the precondition for an informed decision about paying the debt down.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A rise in the burndown chart shows that work increased but does not identify technical debt as the cause.
- B. Inflating story points hides the debt inside estimates instead of making it visible.
- D. Adding refactoring to every story is a remedy, not a way to communicate the debt's impact.
Question 12
While struggling to take ownership of delivery, an agile team fails to keep up with its sprint commitments.
What should the agile coach do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Encourage the team to more frequently interact with all stakeholders
A team that struggles to take ownership of delivery often lacks a direct connection to the people who use and value its work. The agile coach should encourage the team to interact more frequently with all stakeholders, so team members hear priorities, expectations, and feedback firsthand rather than through intermediaries. That direct collaboration helps the team understand the purpose of its commitments, make realistic plans, and feel accountable for the outcomes. Coaching the team toward this engagement builds self-organization and ownership instead of imposing control from outside.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Setting expectations with the sponsor imposes direction from above and does not help the team itself build ownership.
- B. Negotiating a deliverables list with the customer is contract-style scope control that removes ownership from the team.
- D. Completing upfront product design is a plan-driven practice that does not help the team own its delivery.
Question 13
Some members of an agile project team work remotely, so it is difficult to have regular face-to-face backlog grooming sessions.
How should the agile practitioner ensure that the team is able to reduce miscommunication and rework in this environment?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Invest in technology-collaboration tools to enable effective communication and ensure a common understanding of the scope, issues, and solutions.
When some members work remotely, the team still needs rich, real-time communication during backlog refinement to build a shared understanding and avoid rework. Investing in collaboration technology such as video conferencing, shared virtual whiteboards, digital boards and shared backlog tools lets everyone see and discuss the same information together, which makes scope, issues and solutions clear to the whole team. Good tooling approximates the benefits of face-to-face conversation for a distributed team.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Planning events around the majority leaves remote members underserved, which preserves the miscommunication rather than solving it.
- B. Forcing full colocation for every event is usually impractical and does not address how a distributed team works day to day.
- D. Taking a vote on the approach after noting stakeholder communication styles does not provide the shared, real-time understanding needed for refinement.
Question 14
How should an agile project leader interact with the product owner?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Ensure they attend regular sprint meetings to provide product-feature feedback
The product owner is part of the agile team and should take part in its regular events. An agile project leader serves the team by making sure the product owner attends sprint planning, the sprint review, and refinement sessions, where the product owner clarifies priorities and gives feedback on features as they are built. This keeps feedback loops short, maintains a shared understanding of value, and avoids side meetings or status reports that bypass the team.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Separate one-on-one feature reviews bypass the team and duplicate what the sprint events already provide.
- C. Circulating task status and milestones is a predictive reporting habit, not collaboration with the product owner.
- D. Meetings for the product owner to direct the team undermine the team's self-management.
Question 15
During an iteration review, the agile team asserts that a product is complete because development and review were finished. The product owner disagrees, since the product has not been tested.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Work with the agile team and product owner to agree on the definition of done
The disagreement shows that the team and the product owner hold different views of what complete means. The definition of done creates a shared understanding of the quality standards an increment must meet, and testing is normally an essential part of it. The agile practitioner should facilitate a conversation in which the team and the product owner agree on an explicit definition of done that includes testing. Work that does not meet it is not done and returns to the product backlog, and future disputes of this kind are prevented.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. The sponsor does not decide completion criteria, and escalating avoids the collaboration the situation needs.
- C. Scheduling another review treats the symptom and leaves the underlying disagreement about done unresolved.
- D. Testing is part of finishing the work, not a separate backlog item for the product owner to prioritize.
Question 16
An agile team provides feedback that user stories include insufficient details to understand the requirements.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Facilitate a user story workshop with the agile team
A user story is a placeholder for a conversation, and missing detail is resolved by bringing people together to talk. A user story workshop gathers the team, the product owner and relevant stakeholders to discuss the stories, clarify intent, split large items and agree on acceptance criteria. The practitioner facilitates rather than directs, so shared understanding is built collaboratively and the team gains the detail it needs before committing to the work. This also improves how future stories are written.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Limiting changes to acceptance criteria may leave other gaps in the stories and excludes the team from the conversation.
- B. Retrospectives improve the process rather than refine backlog items, and instructing the team is not facilitation.
- D. Reporting the product owner to a manager escalates prematurely and damages collaboration.
Question 17
Midway through a project, the product owner learns from the sponsor that a major component, which is already 20 percent complete, is unimportant to users. The component was part of the approved scope and a key selling point for the project.
What should the product owner do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Request the sponsor's formal approval to discontinue the component
The component is part of the approved scope and a key selling point, so dropping it changes the business case that the sponsor authorized. Information passed on informally is not yet a decision, and a change of this significance should be confirmed by the person accountable for the investment. The product owner should therefore obtain the sponsor's formal approval to discontinue the component, then reorder the product backlog so the team stops work on it and redirects capacity to more valuable items. This keeps the change transparent and properly authorized.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A change control board is not part of agile backlog management, and the sponsor is the accountable decision maker here.
- B. Continuing to build a component users do not value wastes capacity on low-value work.
- C. Stopping work on an approved key selling point before the sponsor formally agrees acts ahead of the decision.
Question 18
A member of a project's development team approaches the team lead and requests database administrator training. The team member believes that their inability to handle this work and to rely on outside specialists is impacting team velocity.
What should the agile team lead do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Send the member to training
Agile teams aim to be cross-functional so that they can deliver finished work without waiting on external specialists. The team member has identified a concrete dependency that is slowing the team and has proposed a practical remedy. Supporting that request by sending the team member to database administrator training builds the team's capability, develops a generalizing specialist, and removes a source of delay. A servant leader enables the growth that team members ask for when it clearly helps the team deliver value.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Asking the outside specialists does not reduce the dependency that is hurting velocity.
- C. Holding the training until the team confirms a problem already identified adds delay and second-guesses the team member's insight.
- D. Waiting for the whole team to attend is unnecessary and prolongs the dependency on outside specialists.
Question 19
A new agile project manager accepts an assignment to manage a well-established team. Many team members have worked together on this product for several years. During a meeting, the project manager notices that team members offer little vocal interaction, yet all required tasks are completed on time.
What type of behaviour does this describe?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Collaborative
A long-standing team that delivers all required tasks on time with little vocal interaction shows the behavior of a mature, high-performing team. Over years of working together, members have built trust, shared norms and an understanding of each other's work, so coordination happens smoothly without lengthy discussion. This is effective collaboration: the team works together toward a common goal and the consistent on-time results confirm it. A new project manager should recognize this and avoid disrupting a team that is already working well.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Synchronous describes communication that happens in real time, not a pattern of team behavior that explains consistent on-time delivery.
- C. Passive-aggressive behavior is indirect hostility or resistance, and nothing in the scenario shows hostility from a team that reliably delivers.
- D. Random behavior would produce unpredictable results, which contradicts the team's consistent on-time completion.
Question 20
A seven-member agile team's composition varies considerably in age, gender, culture, personality type, and professional background.
When planning a team-building event, what type of interpersonal skills should the project leader use?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Social awareness
Social awareness, a component of emotional intelligence, is the ability to perceive and understand the feelings, needs and perspectives of others, including people of different ages, cultures, genders, personalities and backgrounds. When planning a team-building event for a diverse team, the leader needs this skill to choose activities that are inclusive and comfortable for everyone and that build trust rather than alienating some members. Sensitivity to these differences is what makes the event effective at bringing the team together.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Networking builds professional contacts outside the team and does not address sensitivity to team diversity.
- C. Communication matters in every situation, but it does not specifically address understanding diverse needs and perspectives.
- D. Leadership is a broad capability and does not name the specific skill of reading and respecting differences among people.
Question 21
A project team meets to estimate user stories for a sprint. While an important non-functional requirement must be delivered in the sprint, the estimate exceeds sprint capacity.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Break non-functional requirements into those that can be delivered in the given sprint
When an important piece of work is too large for the sprint, the agile response is to split it rather than force it in or drop it. The team can break the non-functional requirement into smaller, independently verifiable parts, for example by component, threshold or scenario, and deliver the parts that fit within the sprint capacity while ordering the remainder for following sprints with the product owner. This keeps commitments realistic, lets the team make real progress on the requirement now and preserves a sustainable pace.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Estimating only functional requirements ignores the non-functional requirement that must be delivered.
- B. Adding people does not change capacity quickly and new members usually slow the team at first.
- C. Referring the issue onward leaves the work too large; the team should first split it into deliverable parts.
Question 22
A product owner obtains customer confirmation on product requirements and provides them to the team. After explaining the user stories, the product owner receives agreement for acceptance from the team.
What should the team do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Complete the user stories, and provide a demo for the product owner and customer
The requirements are confirmed by the customer, the product owner has explained the user stories and the team has agreed to accept them, so the work is understood and committed. The next step is to build the user stories to the agreed acceptance criteria and then demonstrate the working result to the product owner and customer. The demonstration closes the feedback loop: the customer inspects real working product, confirms that it delivers the intended value and can request adjustments early, which is the purpose of a review in agile delivery.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Once the stories are understood and accepted, the next step is to build and demonstrate them, not to start a separate estimation exercise.
- B. Agreeing on activities is part of doing the work and stops short of delivering and validating it.
- D. A retrospective inspects the team's process, not the completed stories, and leaves out customer feedback.
Question 23
During a project review, the team discovers customer feedback that would add scope. The project leader is concerned that the team will be unable to incorporate this feedback and still meet the product launch date.
What should the project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Encourage all feedback, then work with the customer to prioritize work for future sprints
Agile welcomes changing requirements, so customer feedback should be encouraged, not filtered out. The concern about the launch date is handled through prioritization: all feedback is captured, and the project leader works with the customer and the product owner to rank it against the existing backlog. The most valuable items can be included where capacity allows, and the rest are scheduled for future sprints, which keeps the customer engaged while protecting the launch date.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A formal change request process is a predictive control that slows response and discourages collaboration with the customer.
- B. Limiting feedback to what is easy discards input that may be more valuable than work already planned.
- D. The team alone should not decide which feedback to incorporate; prioritization involves the customer and the product owner.
Question 24
After completing the release plan, the team realizes that the project is very likely to have a negative ROI.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Communicate the risk of a negative ROI to the stakeholders, and update the release plan
A likely negative return on investment is a fundamental business risk, and the decision on whether and how to continue belongs to the stakeholders and the product owner, not to the team acting alone. The team should make the risk transparent by communicating it to the stakeholders and then update the release plan to reflect the decisions they make, which may include reducing scope, changing approach or stopping the project. Early, honest communication supports informed decisions and reflects the agile values of transparency and customer collaboration.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Removing low-priority stories does not guarantee a positive return, and scope and priority decisions belong with the product owner and stakeholders.
- B. Replacing team members disrupts the team and does not address why the project is unlikely to deliver a return.
- C. Waste removal may help efficiency, but it assumes the cause is waste and leaves stakeholders unaware of a critical business risk.
Question 25
During a current sprint, a team member asks permission from the scrum master to investigate an alternative design approach.
What should the scrum master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Encourage the team member to use experimentation/spikes for continuous improvement and help the team understand why it is important
Agile teams improve by experimenting and learning quickly. When a team member wants to explore an alternative design, the scrum master should encourage a timeboxed spike or experiment and help the whole team understand how such investigations reduce uncertainty and support continuous improvement. Developers decide how to do their work, so permission is not really the scrum master's to grant; the scrum master's role is to coach and to foster a culture in which trying new approaches is welcomed and the results are shared.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Discouraging the investigation stifles learning and contradicts the agile emphasis on adapting the approach.
- B. Design findings feed the work in progress, and the retrospective is focused on process improvement rather than design results.
- C. Demanding a fully developed experiment defeats the purpose of a spike, which is a small, quick investigation.
Question 26
A team member is stressed due to a heavy workload, while other team members have some slack in their schedules.
How should the team lead address this?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Meet personally with the stressed team member to brainstorm ways to better manage their time
A team member who is stressed by a heavy workload needs support, and a servant leader responds by meeting with that person directly. A personal conversation shows care for the member's well-being, gives the leader a clear understanding of what is driving the stress, and lets the two of them brainstorm practical ways to manage the work, such as reprioritizing tasks, asking teammates for help, or limiting work in progress. This approach protects sustainable pace and psychological safety without exposing the member's difficulties in front of the whole team.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Requesting more resources from management is unnecessary when the team already has slack and the cause of the stress has not been explored.
- B. Raising one member's stress at the daily stand-up turns a personal well-being concern into a public status item before the leader understands it.
- D. Tracking one person's tasks in a separate backlog adds overhead, reduces transparency, and singles the member out.
Question 27
As a team completes their 21st sprint, new information reveals that a number of significant system integrations must be made to ensure the project scope is met.
How should the project management plan be adjusted?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Periodically, at both the release and project level
Agile planning is progressive and multi-level: the project or product roadmap, release plans and iteration plans are each revisited at their own cadence as new information emerges. Significant new system integrations affect scope, sequencing and possibly release dates, so their impact belongs in the release plan and the overall project plan, and those plans should continue to be reviewed periodically rather than fixed once. This rolling wave approach keeps the higher-level plans aligned with reality while sprint-level planning handles the detailed work of each iteration.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A single holistic revision at the project level ignores the release level and treats replanning as a one-time event rather than an ongoing practice.
- B. Sprint-end adjustments address iteration detail and do not by themselves reshape the release and project plans that the integrations affect.
- C. Adjusting only at the sprint level after each demo is too narrow for a change that alters overall scope and release planning.
Question 28
During a sprint review, the product owner identifies a required improvement for a feature's user interface (UI) delivered during the sprint.
What should the product owner do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Create a user story for this new improvement and put it in the product backlog for prioritization and validation by the customer
Feedback gathered at the sprint review is a normal input to the product backlog. The product owner should capture the user interface improvement as a user story and add it to the product backlog, where it can be ordered against all other work based on value and confirmed with the customer and stakeholders who will use the feature. This keeps the product backlog as the single source of work, lets the improvement compete fairly with other items, and ensures that the change truly reflects customer needs before the team commits to it.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Committing the story to the next sprint before ordering it against other backlog items skips value-based prioritization.
- C. New insight from a sprint review is expected in agile and is not requirement creep.
- D. Pushing extra story points onto the team bypasses the product backlog and the team's own sprint planning.
Question 29
A software development team is working in an environment in which increased competition, demanding customer expectations, and new technological developments pose significant challenges.
How should the team plan improvements to their product?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Hold regular retrospectives and have team members commit to specific actions.
In a volatile environment shaped by competition, rising customer expectations and new technology, a team must inspect and adapt frequently. Regular retrospectives give the team a structured cadence to reflect on what is working, identify what should change and agree on concrete improvement actions. Having team members commit to specific, owned actions turns those discussions into real change, and reviewing the actions at the next retrospective closes the loop. This steady cycle of reflection and commitment lets the team keep improving how it delivers value as conditions shift.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Following a fixed schedule created at the start ignores the changing conditions and prevents the team from adapting.
- C. Trusting individual choices without a shared reflection and commitment process leaves improvements uncoordinated and easy to drop.
- D. Tightly coupled code makes the product harder to change, which works against adapting to a fast-moving market.
Question 30
Senior management is frustrated at the lack of a detailed implementation plan that shows exactly when the project will end and when all requirements will be met.
The team has been using a rolling wave planning approach so far on the project.
How should the agile practitioner explain to senior management the benefits of this approach?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. It prevents a wasteful build-up of requirements inventory that may never be processed
Rolling wave planning details near-term work and keeps later work at a high level, elaborating it progressively as the team learns more. Its main benefit is that it avoids investing effort in a large inventory of detailed requirements that may change or never be built, which Lean treats as waste. The agile practitioner can explain to senior management that forecasts will be refined each iteration using actual velocity, giving increasingly reliable dates while protecting the project from rework on requirements that become obsolete.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Rolling wave planning deliberately varies the level of detail, keeping near-term work detailed and later work coarse.
- C. It does not fix scope, cost and duration up front; those are refined progressively as the work proceeds.
- D. It keeps release content open to change rather than locking down the stories in advance.
Question 31
The team is in the middle of an iteration and there is an urgent request for a small change to be introduced to the committed scope. Unless this change is accepted, there is no value to the customers during this iteration.
What must the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Evaluate the impact of the change request and let the team and product owner decide and re-prioritize based on value
Agile welcomes changing requirements, but changes to an iteration in progress must be handled deliberately. The agile practitioner should help assess the impact of the urgent change on the iteration goal and the work already underway, then let the product owner and the team decide together how to proceed. The product owner judges value and priority, and the team judges feasibility and what may need to come out of the iteration to make room. Since the iteration delivers no value without the change, this collaborative trade-off decision protects customer value while respecting both roles.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Deferring the change to the next iteration ignores the fact that the current iteration delivers no value without it.
- C. Cancelling the iteration is a drastic step that should not be recommended before the impact is evaluated.
- D. Adding work to the current iteration without assessing impact bypasses the team's input on capacity and trade-offs.
Question 32
Toward the end of a project, the product owner discovers that the project has a high probability of failure due to a critical feature not functioning as expected.
What should the product owner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Continue the project, release the product without the failing feature, and fix the feature in a subsequent release
The product owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product. Because agile work is delivered incrementally, the features that already function can provide real value to customers even when one critical feature does not yet work. Continuing the project, releasing the product without the failing feature, and fixing that feature in a subsequent release lets the organization realize a return on what has been built, gather feedback from actual use, and address the failing feature in a later increment. This preserves value instead of abandoning the investment.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Terminating the project discards the working functionality that could already be delivering value to customers.
- B. Framing the decision around cutting losses sets aside the working increment that can be released now and improved later.
- C. Bringing in experts late in the project adds cost and onboarding delay without guaranteeing that the feature will be fixed in time.
Question 33
During its first sprint, a new scrum team realizes that it has insufficient team members with test automation skills to efficiently complete its stories.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Cross-train some members in the automation framework to broaden their capacity with that skill
The team has some test automation skills, just not enough of them. A self-organizing, cross-functional team addresses this by cross-training other members in the automation framework, for example by pairing with those who already know it. This broadens capacity in the scarce skill, removes the bottleneck, encourages generalizing specialists and keeps the quality benefits of automated testing, all without waiting for outside help.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. The product owner does not staff the team, and adding people is slow and ignores the skills already present.
- C. Waiting for funds delays the solution indefinitely and develops only one person.
- D. Abandoning automation sacrifices quality and long-term efficiency instead of building the needed skill.
Question 34
Due to its complexity, a new team member struggles with developing a concise user story.
What advice should the agile practitioner give to assist with developing the story?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Break the story up and focus on the most valuable parts
A story that is too complex to express concisely is usually too large. The agile practitioner should coach the new team member to split it into smaller stories, for example by workflow step, business rule or data variation, and to focus first on the parts that deliver the most value. Smaller stories are easier to understand, estimate, test and complete within an iteration, in line with the INVEST criteria. This advice also builds the team member's skill in story decomposition.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Handing the story to someone else avoids the problem and does not build the new team member's capability.
- C. The retrospective focuses on improving how the team works and would only delay help with the story.
- D. Picking another story leaves the complex story unresolved and does not deliver its value.
Question 35
What can a team use to prioritize stories?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. MoSCoW method
The MoSCoW method is a prioritization technique that sorts stories into Must have, Should have, Could have and Will not have this time. It gives the product owner and stakeholders a simple, shared language for deciding what is essential to a release and what can be deferred if time runs short. It is widely used in agile work alongside other value-based approaches to order the backlog so that the most important stories are delivered first.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Planning poker is a relative estimation technique for sizing stories, not for ordering them.
- C. A weighted average is a general calculation and not an agile technique for prioritizing stories.
- D. INVEST is a checklist for writing well-formed stories, not a way to rank them.
Question 36
Why should an agile coach model agile principles and behaviours, become self-aware, and be present?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. To better listen, serve and help the team grow their strengths individually and as a team
An agile coach is a servant leader whose purpose is to serve the team and help its members grow. Modeling agile principles and behaviors shows the team what the mindset looks like in practice. Self-awareness helps the coach notice their own reactions and biases, and being present allows them to listen fully. Together these let the coach truly hear the team, respond to its real needs and help people develop their strengths individually and as a team, which leads to empowered, self-organizing teams.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Convincing people what to do is directive persuasion, the opposite of the coaching stance of listening and serving.
- C. Disguising command and control is manipulative and contradicts the transparency and servant leadership a coach must model.
- D. Understanding team dynamics is a means the coach uses, while the reason for these behaviors is to listen to, serve and grow the people on the team.
Question 37
An experienced product owner presents the epics and corresponding stories during a release planning session with the established team. The executive sponsor asks the team when the features will be delivered.
What should the agile team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Initiate an estimation session
The product owner has just presented new epics and stories, so the work has not yet been sized. To answer the sponsor's question about delivery, the developers should first hold an estimation session (for example, relative sizing with planning poker) to estimate the stories. Once the stories carry estimates, the established team can apply its known velocity to forecast how many iterations the features will take and give the sponsor a realistic, evidence-based range. Estimates come from the people doing the work, which keeps the forecast credible and builds commitment to the release plan.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Estimates belong to the developers who will do the work, not to the scrum master, so this undermines team ownership and accuracy.
- B. Velocity cannot be applied to stories that have not yet been sized, so selecting stories by velocity skips a necessary step.
- D. Historical project completion data does not describe the size of these new epics, so it cannot answer when these specific features will be delivered.
Question 38
The customer needs assistance in determining the efficiency of a set of process activities within the solution.
What should the agile team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Review the process value stream to determine potential improvements
Determining the efficiency of a set of process activities is the purpose of value stream analysis, a Lean technique. Mapping the value stream shows each step, the time spent adding value and the time spent waiting, so the team can calculate process efficiency, spot delays, handoffs and other waste, and recommend improvements. Reviewing the process value stream therefore gives the customer a direct, evidence-based answer instead of a general discussion, and it can be done now rather than waiting for a scheduled event.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The iteration retrospective is for the team to improve its own way of working, not to analyze the efficiency of the customer's process activities.
- C. Assessing story value helps order the backlog but does not measure how efficiently a process performs.
- D. The sprint review inspects the increment and gathers feedback on the product, not a detailed analysis of process efficiency.
Question 39
After a successful product deployment, a key stakeholder informs an agile team member that an implemented feature is failing to deliver its expected business value. The team member replies that the requirement was provided by the customer, and that the scope was clearly met.
If the problem were an issue of requirement elicitation rather than delivery, what should have been done to avoid this situation?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Stakeholders should have regularly been engaged to obtain feedback and reduce the functionality risk
Requirements captured once at the start often miss what the business really needs, even when the delivered scope matches them exactly. Agile approaches reduce this functionality risk by engaging stakeholders regularly, showing them working increments and gathering feedback on whether each feature will deliver the expected value. Frequent reviews and demonstrations expose misunderstood requirements early, when they are cheap to correct, rather than after deployment. Delivering exactly what was written is not the goal; delivering value that the stakeholders confirm through ongoing collaboration is.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Deferring decisions to the last responsible moment does not replace the stakeholder feedback that would have exposed the value gap.
- C. Coordinating with interdependent teams improves delivery support but does not validate requirements with stakeholders.
- D. Naming an owner does not by itself create the regular stakeholder engagement and feedback that was missing.
Question 40
A team working with a new technology faces a significant amount of uncertainty about its ability to deliver stories due to technical issues.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Capture risks and make them visible, and use a burndown chart to focus on reducing risks early in the project
New technology brings high uncertainty, so the team should manage it as risk. Capturing the risks and making them visible, for example in a risk register on an information radiator, keeps everyone aware of them. A risk burndown chart tracks total risk exposure over time and shows whether it is falling. Prioritizing work that reduces the biggest risks early, through spikes or early delivery of risky stories, lets the team learn quickly and adapt before problems become costly.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Sprints are fixed timeboxes, and lengthening one hides the uncertainty instead of reducing it.
- C. Raising issues at stand-ups communicates problems but provides no structured way to track and reduce the underlying risks.
- D. Turning to a development manager bypasses the self-organizing team, which is best placed to identify and address its technical risks.
Question 41
During backlog refinement meeting, the new developer on the team asks the product owner to discuss a new performance threshold requirement and how it impacts the stories in the backlog.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Identify the tasks for the new performance threshold requirement
Backlog refinement is where the product owner and the developers break items down and add detail so they are ready for future sprints. A new performance threshold is a nonfunctional requirement that creates concrete work, such as load testing, performance tuning, monitoring and changes to the affected stories. By identifying the tasks the threshold requires, the team makes that work visible, can size it, and gives the product owner what is needed to order it alongside the stories it affects. The new requirement becomes actionable, estimable backlog work instead of an open question.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Copying the threshold into every story as acceptance criteria leaves the work it demands invisible and unestimated.
- B. A spike postpones turning the requirement into work and adds a research item when the team can already break down what the threshold demands.
- C. A separate design planning session focuses on technical solutions rather than on the backlog work the requirement creates.
Question 42
The coach on a new agile team notices that one team member is influencing most of the team's decisions.
What should the coach do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Ask probing questions to other team members to encourage dissenting viewpoints.
When one person dominates decisions, the team loses the diverse perspectives that make self-organization work, and quieter members may stop contributing. A coach handles this through facilitation, not authority: asking probing, open questions of the other team members invites their views and makes healthy dissent safe. This builds psychological safety and leads to more balanced, better-informed decisions while still leaving the decision-making with the team. The dominant member is not punished; the group simply learns to hear more voices.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Replacing the team member is a heavy, punitive step that skips coaching and harms trust.
- B. Self-organization means the whole team decides together, not that one member dominates unchecked.
- D. Waiting for velocity to drop is reactive and lets an unhealthy dynamic settle in first.
Question 43
During a review session, an agile team presented done requirements to a group of stakeholders. Stakeholder feedback indicated that the done requirements failed to meet most pressing needs and provide value.
What should the team have done to prevent this?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Reprioritized requirements prior to committing to iteration work
The stakeholders found that completed work did not address their most pressing needs, which means the team built lower-value items first. Before committing to iteration work, the product backlog should be refined and reordered with the product owner and stakeholders so that the highest-value, most urgent requirements are at the top. The team then plans the iteration from those items. Regular reprioritization keeps delivery aligned with current business needs, which change over time.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Keeping requirements stable during the iteration does not ensure that the right requirements were chosen.
- C. When an item was created has no bearing on its value, so focusing on newer items does not solve the problem.
- D. Delivering features instead of components does not prevent the problem, because features can still be the wrong ones if they are not prioritized by value.
Question 44
A team is delivering work as per the sprint plan, and team velocity is stabilized. However, at the end of the release, the customer is dissatisfied with project quality.
What should the agile project manager have done to avoid this?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Held regular meetings with the product owner and project team to elicit detailed business requirements
Stable velocity shows the team was producing output at a steady rate, but the customer's dissatisfaction shows that the output did not match what the business considered acceptable quality. The product owner represents the customer and owns the product backlog, so regular sessions between the product owner and the team to elicit and refine the business requirements, including acceptance criteria and quality expectations, would have kept the work aligned with customer needs. Ongoing backlog refinement of this kind builds a shared understanding of what done and good enough mean before the work is built.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The daily stand-up is a coordination event for the developers, and customer attendance there does not clarify what quality the business expects.
- B. Design sign-off is a stage-gate approval of plans and does not create the ongoing shared understanding of requirements that prevents quality gaps.
- D. Review meetings inspect work after it is built, whereas the gap here was an unclear understanding of business requirements that needed to be resolved with the product owner as the work was defined.
Question 45
A member of a cross-functional project team is not able to attend regular status meetings and provide progress updates, which is impacting the productivity of the entire team.
What should the product owner do to improve productivity?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Ask the team member to update daily progress on the information radiators.
Information radiators, such as task boards and burndown charts, make progress visible to everyone at any time without anyone having to attend a meeting. Asking the team member to update the information radiator every day keeps the work transparent, so the rest of the team can coordinate, spot dependencies and keep moving even when that person cannot attend. This resolves the communication gap that is hurting productivity, while keeping the update short and owned by the person doing the work.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Cutting the backlog reacts to a symptom and leaves the communication gap in place.
- B. Having the product owner collect and relay updates turns the role into a status reporter and adds a step instead of making the work visible.
- D. Altering velocity to look better is dishonest and destroys the transparency radiators exist to provide.
Question 46
Management decides to set up a new project to exploit an emergent market opportunity. Management suggests using an agile approach that is currently working for another project.
What should the agile leader do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Work with the team to analyze the market opportunity and create a tailored agile approach if needed.
No single agile approach fits every context, so an approach that works for another project should not be copied without examination. The agile leader should work with the team to understand the new market opportunity, including its uncertainty, urgency, product characteristics and constraints, and then tailor the delivery approach where needed. Tailoring is a core principle in the Agile Practice Guide and PMBOK Guide seventh edition, and involving the team builds ownership of the chosen way of working while ensuring it suits the new project.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A broad stakeholder workshop is a heavier step than needed and shifts the choice of delivery approach away from the team that must use it.
- B. Proposing an approach from a previous project repeats the same mistake of reuse without analyzing the new context.
- C. Accepting the suggestion to avoid conflict skips the analysis needed to confirm the approach suits the new project.
Question 47
An executive requests information regarding a sprint status.
What action should the product owner take?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Direct the executive to the information radiator
Information radiators, such as task boards and burndown charts displayed where anyone can see them, exist to make sprint status available to everyone at any time without special reports. Directing the executive to the information radiator gives current, accurate status immediately, promotes transparency and self-service, and avoids pulling the product owner or team into producing separate updates. It also shows the executive where to look for status in the future.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The daily scrum is a short event for the developers to inspect progress and adapt their plan, not a status meeting for executives.
- C. A personal meeting consumes time and repeats information that is already openly visible.
- D. An emailed report is a static snapshot that soon goes stale and duplicates the radiator.
Question 48
The team is derailed by a demand from a senior manager unrelated to the project.
How does the agile coach help the team?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. By advising the team to remain committed and focused on project goals
An unrelated demand from a senior manager is an outside distraction that pulls the team away from its agreed goals. The agile coach protects the team by encouraging it to stay committed to the project goals and focused on the prioritized work, and should route any new request through the product owner and normal prioritization instead of letting it derail the team. Protecting focus this way lets the team keep delivering value at a sustainable pace and makes clear that outside requests go through the product owner, not straight to the team.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Pushing the team to beat its previous velocity adds pressure and does nothing about the distraction.
- B. The scrum master does not set expectations for a self-organizing team, and this ignores the outside interference.
- C. Overestimating to inflate velocity is dishonest and corrupts planning data.
Question 49
A project team realizes that an important task on the iteration backlog will take more time than originally estimated.
What should the project team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Stop working on the task and include it in the next iteration
Iterations are fixed timeboxes, and when a task proves larger than estimated, agile teams adjust scope rather than extend the timebox or overload the plan. The team should stop working on the task in this iteration, make the situation visible to the product owner, and return the work to the backlog so it can be re-estimated and planned into the next iteration. This protects the other committed work in the current iteration, keeps the cadence predictable, and lets the product owner decide its priority with accurate information.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Continuing regardless of the timebox lets one task consume the iteration and puts the remaining committed work at risk.
- B. Removing the task owner punishes an estimating miss and does nothing to address the work.
- C. Adding resources to a late task usually slows it further because of onboarding and coordination overhead.
Question 50
While working on a sprint for a software development project, the team is unsure of how the feature should be designed. The project sponsor recommends developing a prototype of the user interface to discover more about this feature.
Why is the project sponsor making this suggestion?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. The users can help the team understand if the feature adds value, avoiding the risk of building the wrong product.
A prototype of the user interface is a fast, low-cost way to learn when the team is unsure how a feature should be designed. Showing it to users lets them react to something concrete, so the team learns whether the feature delivers value and how it should behave before investing in full development. This reduces the risk of building the wrong product, which is one of the most expensive forms of waste, and gives the team validated feedback to shape the design.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The prototype is meant to clarify the feature's design and value, not to reallocate resources across features.
- B. Nothing indicates that the sponsor doubts the team's choice of features; the uncertainty is about how one feature should be designed.
- D. A prototype is a learning tool rather than production software, so users do not start using it as a working release.
Question 51
During a sprint demo, a business representative identifies missing requirements. The agile practitioner realizes that all key stakeholders were not included during requirements detailing.
What should the agile practitioner have done to avoid the situation?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Engaged key stakeholders periodically to collect requirements
Missing requirements surfaced because some key stakeholders were left out while requirements were being detailed. Agile requirements are elaborated progressively, just in time, so stakeholder engagement must be continuous rather than a single event. Identifying all key stakeholders and engaging them periodically, for example in backlog refinement, story workshops and sprint reviews, ensures their needs are captured as stories are detailed and gives frequent chances to catch gaps early. This steady collaboration is what prevents late surprises when the increment is shown.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Including stakeholders in one planning meeting is a one-time touchpoint and does not cover the ongoing detailing of requirements.
- B. An earlier demo would detect the gap sooner but would not prevent it, since the stakeholders would still be absent from requirements work.
- C. Formal sign-off freezes requirements on paper and does not ensure the right stakeholders contributed or that needs stay current.
Question 52
During a retrospective meeting, a team develops a large list of initiatives. All will have a positive impact and improve team performance.
What should the agile coach do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Help the team choose one or two initiatives for immediate implementation
Even when every idea is beneficial, a team cannot absorb many changes at once without losing focus and capacity for delivery. The agile coach should help the team select the one or two improvements expected to have the greatest impact and commit to implementing them right away, often by adding them to the next sprint backlog. The team can then inspect the results at the next retrospective and pick further items, making continuous improvement steady and measurable.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Acknowledging the list and sharing it with management produces no actual improvement.
- B. Implementing everything at once overwhelms the team and makes it hard to see which change helped.
- D. Complexity is not the selection criterion, and starting with the hardest change risks stalling improvement.
Question 53
During sprint planning the product owner wants the team to prioritize and deliver a number of features which have the highest business value. Due to technical dependencies, the team does not agree with the prioritization.
What should the project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Ensure the team captures the technical dependencies as issues within the backlog optimization
The product owner orders the backlog by business value, while the developers understand the technical dependencies that affect how the work can be sequenced. The project leader should ensure the team captures those dependencies in the backlog so they are visible during backlog refinement and prioritization. With the constraints made explicit, the product owner can make an informed ordering decision that balances value with what is technically feasible, and the disagreement becomes a shared, transparent input rather than a standoff.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Restricting the sprint to features without dependencies would sacrifice the highest-value work instead of managing the dependencies.
- B. Pressing on with a plan the team believes is infeasible ignores the developers' expertise and plans for unfinished work.
- D. Engaging subject matter experts does not make the dependencies the developers already identified visible in the backlog.
Question 54
A product owner concludes that the majority of a project's value can be delivered by completing only the first half of the prioritized backlog.
What should the product owner do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Work with the team to deploy the first half of the backlog to ensure that value is realized
Agile delivery seeks to maximize value early and to maximize the amount of work not done. If the top half of the ordered product backlog holds most of the value, the product owner should work with the team to deliver and deploy those items so that the value is realized as soon as possible. Real usage and feedback from that release then give the product owner evidence for deciding, with stakeholders, whether the remaining items are worth building at all.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Removing half the backlog unilaterally and announcing it later lacks transparency and discards options without evidence.
- B. The backlog is already ordered by value, so simply pushing items into future iterations adds nothing.
- D. Reviewing scope before delivering delays value realization, and real usage feedback makes that decision better informed.
Question 55
A company has decided to combine two similar products consisting of multiple teams into one product. Engaged customers want to know how the company is looking at re-organizing its teams.
What strategy should be employed to re-organize the teams?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. All the teams from both products should be simultaneously called together and allowed to completely self-manage
Agile organizations trust the people doing the work to decide how best to organize it. Bringing all the teams from both products together at once and letting them self-manage the new structure, often called a self-selection or reteaming approach, uses their knowledge of skills, components, and working relationships. Because everyone takes part at the same time, the result is transparent and fair, and people commit more strongly to teams they shaped themselves. Leaders supply the product goal and constraints while the teams design their own arrangement.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Merging teams by component imposes a structure from above and tends to create component teams rather than value-focused teams.
- C. Building teams mechanically from one member per role ignores working relationships and the actual skills needed.
- D. Organizing teams around a feature ranking is a management design imposed on the teams rather than chosen by them.
Question 56
Two similar stories, A and B, are estimated at 3 story points. Story C is estimated at 8 points. After an iteration in which A and C were completed, it is found that story A took much longer than story C.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Re-estimate all stories including values for A, B and C
Story points are relative, so when a 3-point story takes much longer than an 8-point story, the relationship between the estimates has broken down. Story B is similar to story A, and story C may have been overestimated, so neither value can be trusted on its own. The team should re-estimate the stories, including A, B and C, to restore a consistent relative baseline. Using the actual experience to recalibrate keeps the reference stories reliable, so future estimates, velocity and forecasts rest on accurate comparisons.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Setting story B above 8 points assumes story C was estimated correctly, which is not known, and patches one value without recalibrating the scale.
- B. Adding points to the iteration while keeping story B at 3 points knowingly keeps a wrong estimate and distorts velocity.
- C. Adding resources to match an inaccurate estimate does not correct the estimate, and the practitioner does not assign resources to stories.
Question 57
A project team has a senior subject matter expert (SME) who is comfortable with data integration. The SME is not inclined to perform regression testing because the SME feels that performing regression testing is more of a junior duty.
What should the scrum master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Explain to the team the importance of reducing team size by reducing specializations and bottlenecks and that every team member plays an equal part.
Agile teams are cross-functional and share responsibility for the whole increment, so no task is beneath any member. Rigid specialization creates bottlenecks and handoffs, and it inflates the number of people needed to cover every skill. When the scrum master explains to the team why reducing specializations matters, and that every member plays an equal part, the issue becomes a coaching conversation about shared values instead of a confrontation. This encourages the SME to act as a generalizing specialist who contributes to testing as well as data integration.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. In agile, developers choose and plan their own work; the scrum master does not assign tasks or impose compliance.
- B. Endorsing narrow specialization creates bottlenecks and undermines collective ownership of quality.
- C. A separate testing team adds handoffs and delays feedback, which goes against a cross-functional team model.
Question 58
A key stakeholder cannot attend the project vision statement development workshop. The stakeholder has emailed their requirements to the agile team lead, and believes that the vision statement is not critical.
How should the agile team lead respond?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Emphasize to the stakeholder that a common, detailed vision will better ensure team understanding of the project
A shared product vision aligns the team and stakeholders on why the project exists and what success looks like, and it guides decisions as detailed requirements change. The stakeholder's view that the vision is not critical is a misunderstanding the agile team lead should address directly and respectfully, explaining that a common vision improves team understanding and decision making. This educates the stakeholder and encourages engagement in the vision work, instead of quietly accepting a list of emailed requirements as a substitute for alignment.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Gathering requirements privately and relaying a vision bypasses the collaborative alignment the vision workshop is meant to build.
- C. A vision built only from one stakeholder's emailed requirements lacks the shared understanding of the wider group.
- D. Telling the team the vision is not critical is false, since the vision guides decisions precisely because requirements change.
Question 59
To create the project vision, an agile team has scheduled an initial meeting with their customer representative.
What should the team bring to this meeting?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. A list of questions for the team and customer representative
A visioning session is a collaborative discovery conversation, so the team should arrive with a prepared list of questions that draws out the customer representative's goals, target users, desired outcomes, constraints and measures of success. Open questions put the customer's voice at the center, expose assumptions early and build the shared understanding that the vision statement will capture. The answers then guide later work such as identifying stakeholders, writing user stories and defining acceptance criteria, all of which depend on first agreeing on why the product exists and what value it must deliver.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Templates may format a vision statement, but they do not uncover the customer's needs and goals that the meeting exists to explore.
- B. Stakeholder lists and user stories are produced after the vision is understood, so bringing them first presumes answers the meeting has not yet reached.
- C. Acceptance tests describe detailed conditions for specific deliverables and belong to later refinement, not to an initial visioning conversation.
Question 60
The amount of information captured in the project's defects is varying within the development team. Team members are becoming frustrated with the defect quality inconsistencies and the frequent clarification required.
What should be done to address the issue?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Generate insights at the next retrospective and adjust processes as decided by the team
Inconsistent defect information is a process problem within the team's own way of working, and the retrospective is the event designed for inspecting and adapting the process. At the next retrospective the team can generate insights into why defect reports vary, agree on what information a defect must contain, and own the resulting change. Because the team decides the improvement itself, it is more likely to be adopted and sustained than a rule imposed from outside.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Stopping the iteration is a drastic disruption to delivery for a process issue that can wait for the retrospective.
- B. Planning focuses on what work to take on next, while process improvement belongs in the retrospective.
- D. Placing corrective actions in the backlog for the team to execute presumes the solution instead of letting the team inspect and agree on it.
Question 61
A company is moving into a new space and is determining the best configuration for offices. The management team is also considering moving to an agile process.
What advice should an agilist give?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Arrange the office space to allow co-location of development teams and centrally located information radiators
Agile methods favor face-to-face conversation as the most efficient and effective way to share information, so an agile workspace should place each team together in one area. Co-location supports osmotic communication, quick questions, and close collaboration, while centrally located information radiators such as task boards and burndown charts keep progress visible to the team and to anyone passing by. Recommending this configuration helps the organization build the physical environment that supports whichever agile approach it adopts.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Isolating teams works against the collaboration and communication that agile depends on.
- C. Promoting isolation contradicts the agile emphasis on interaction, even though some quiet space can be useful.
- D. Office layout does not need to wait for a final method choice, because co-location and visible information benefit every agile approach.
Question 62
During a Kanban team's daily stand-up, an agile coach observes that the team seems disinterested in the work status. While it appears that there are no issues with flow, there is a marked lack of attention to team effort.
When the agile coach queries the team for reasons, members explain that work continues to be scheduled with no end in sight.
What should the agile coach do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Provide the team with a break by scheduling a team event
Flow is healthy, so the problem is not the process but the team's energy and motivation: members feel that work arrives with no end in sight. A servant leader looks after the well-being of the team and supports a sustainable pace. Scheduling a team event gives members a deliberate break from the continuous stream of work, a chance to reconnect with one another, and a visible signal that their effort is valued. This restores engagement directly without disturbing the flow that is already working.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Planning future celebration points helps over time but gives no immediate relief to a team that is already disengaged now and needs a break from the continuous workload.
- C. Raising WIP levels increases multitasking and cycle time and adds to the sense of endless work.
- D. Flow is not the problem, so changing WIP levels does not address the team's loss of energy.
Question 63
There is a database feature requiring three members of a seven person team. A meeting is scheduled at the beginning of the sprint to go over technical needs to complete the story.
Who should the Scrum Master invite to the meeting?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. The core team and the product owner
A meeting at the start of the sprint to work through what a story needs should include the people doing the work and the person who can clarify it. The core team members contribute the technical knowledge and plan how to build the database feature, while the product owner explains the intent, value and acceptance criteria and answers questions about scope. Bringing the team and product owner together creates a shared understanding of the requirement without involving people who add little to the technical discussion.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The customer is represented by the product owner and is not needed to work through technical implementation needs.
- B. Key stakeholders do not do the work, and leaving out the core team removes the people who must plan the technical solution.
- C. The customer and sponsor cannot plan the technical work, and this pairing omits both the team and the product owner.
Question 64
While attending a conference, an agile practitioner learns of a new user interface (UI) framework that could benefit the team.
What should the agile practitioner do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Discuss this option at the next retrospective
A new user interface framework is a possible improvement to how the team works, and the retrospective is the team's forum for inspecting and adapting its tools and practices. Raising the idea there lets the whole team discuss its benefits, costs and fit with current work, and decide together whether to investigate it further, for example through a spike. The agile practitioner shares useful knowledge as a servant leader without assigning work or imposing a technical decision on the team.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Assigning a team member to a proof of concept is a directive decision made without team discussion.
- B. Ordering immediate adoption by email imposes an untested change and ignores the team's ownership of its practices.
- C. Collecting feedback individually and steering a backlog item bypasses the team's collective decision in its own improvement forum.
Question 65
An agile project leader is delivering a team kick-off session. The first exercise is a "Life Timeline": a story-telling exercise where each team member tells their life story, explains how they experienced the highs and lows of their journey, and identifies their fears and hopes.
What is the project leader trying to create?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. A safe space for team members to learn about each other's weaknesses and strengths
In a Life Timeline exercise each team member describes the highs and lows of their journey and their fears and hopes. The highs reveal what people do well and what energizes them, while the lows and fears reveal where they struggle and what support they need. In the safe space of a kick-off, team members learn about each other's weaknesses and strengths, which helps a new team understand how to support one another, distribute work sensibly and build cross-functional collaboration from the start.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Trust is earned over time through working together and keeping commitments, so it is not what a single storytelling exercise creates.
- B. Vulnerability is the means of the exercise, and high performance relationships are far beyond what a kick-off activity can create.
- C. Sharing is the activity itself, not the outcome the leader is trying to create.
Question 66
An agile project manager notices that the product manager manages team members' day-to-day tasks in a way that distracts them from their core responsibilities.
In addition, the team believes that their questions on product backlog prioritization are not being answered on time.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Discuss and address this in the iteration retrospective
The problems concern how the team and the product owner work together: task direction that distracts team members and slow answers on backlog prioritization. The iteration retrospective is the event designed for inspecting people, relationships, processes, and tools, and the product owner takes part as a member of the team. Raising both issues there lets everyone discuss the impact openly, clarify expectations about who manages tasks and how quickly prioritization questions are answered, and agree on concrete improvements together. Solutions the whole team agrees on are more likely to stick than a fix imposed by one person.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Agile teams manage their own tasks, so directing tasks is not the project manager's job either.
- C. A private discussion with the product owner leaves the team out of agreeing how it wants to work with the product owner.
- D. Extra hours are not sustainable and do not correct the product owner's misplaced focus.
Question 67
A team is creating a highly marketed, time-sensitive product. The agile coach is concerned that anything other than exceptional quality will result in bad publicity for the company.
What should the agile coach ensure that developers do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Perform demos at the end of each iteration
When the product is highly visible and time-sensitive, quality problems must be caught well before public release. Demonstrating the increment at the end of each iteration lets the product owner and stakeholders inspect working product regularly, confirm that it meets their quality expectations and raise concerns while there is still time to fix them. This steady feedback loop, built into the cadence of iterations, prevents quality surprises late in the schedule and gives the company confidence that what reaches the market reflects exceptional quality.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Pair programming and peer reviews check code among developers but do not confirm with stakeholders that the product meets their quality expectations.
- C. Handing code to a separate QA team after completion finds defects late and creates a bottleneck.
- D. Showing each feature to the client as soon as coding is complete exposes unfinished, untested work and disrupts the iteration cadence.
Question 68
A new product owner shares the product vision during the team launch event. The team asks for clarification on the product roadmap and its high-level features.
What should the product owner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Prioritize the product backlog for the upcoming release
The product owner is accountable for the product backlog and for turning the vision and roadmap into ordered work. When the team asks for clarity on the roadmap and its high-level features, the product owner responds by prioritizing the product backlog for the upcoming release, which shows what will be delivered first and why. This makes the roadmap concrete and gives the developers a clear basis for refinement and planning. Tasks, design, and estimates belong to the developers.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Defining implementation tasks is the developers' work during planning, not the product owner's.
- B. Detailed design is decided by the developers, not dictated by the product owner.
- D. Estimating stories is done by the developers who will do the work.
Question 69
During product development, changes in technology and regulations require the team to reassess product architecture.
How should this technical debt be captured?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Include it in the product backlog and use a new indicator to annotate that it is technical debt
Architectural rework driven by changes in technology and regulation is real work that must be visible and prioritized alongside features. Capturing it in the product backlog with a distinct indicator, such as a technical debt label or item type, makes it transparent to the team and stakeholders and lets the product owner weigh it against other work. The indicator also allows the team to track how much debt exists and how quickly it is being paid down, which supports informed decisions about quality, risk, and sustainable pace.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Fixing the priority as low in advance ignores the risk and cost of the debt, and ordering the backlog is a value decision made case by case.
- C. Agile teams actively track and manage technical debt, because ignoring it degrades quality and slows future delivery.
- D. Personal lists hide the work from the team and product owner, which prevents transparency and proper prioritization.
Question 70
An agile project has three more iterations before the release. There is a lot of report functionality to be created and defects to be cleared. During a daily scrum, a team member suggests a timebox spike to find a more efficient way to deliver reports.
What should the project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Encourage the team to self-organize and determine how to best complete their existing work and this spike
The team member's proposal of a timeboxed spike to find a more efficient way to build reports could help the team finish its remaining work before the release. The developers own how the sprint work gets done, so the project leader should encourage them to self-organize: weigh the spike against existing reports and defects, decide whether and how to fit it in, and keep it timeboxed. This respects the team's ownership of its plan while keeping the release goal in view.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Rejecting the idea dismisses a possible efficiency gain and overrides the team's own judgment.
- C. Directing deferral is a command decision that removes the chance to improve delivery for this release.
- D. Ordering the team to start the spike immediately is equally directive and ignores their existing commitments.
Question 71
An agile team has been given a complex project with a basic set of requirements which need further elaboration and review.
How should the team iteratively build out the backlog of requirements with the stakeholders?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Conduct a requirement gathering workshop
When requirements are only basic and need elaboration, the team should work with stakeholders directly to build shared understanding. A requirement gathering workshop, using techniques such as story writing, story mapping or product box exercises, brings the product owner, team and stakeholders together to explore needs, write and refine user stories and surface acceptance criteria. Holding such sessions repeatedly as learning grows lets the backlog emerge progressively and reflects the value placed on individuals and interactions and on customer collaboration.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Building the basic requirements without elaborating them first risks delivering work that does not meet real stakeholder needs.
- C. Having the product owner fill in the backlog alone leaves out the team and stakeholders, whose input is needed to elaborate requirements.
- D. Requiring a complete backlog before the project starts is big upfront requirements gathering, which conflicts with progressive elaboration.
Question 72
During an iteration planning meeting, the team suggests changes to add product value that will require extra work and impact the schedule.
What should the agile project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Ask the product owner for approval to proceed
The product owner is accountable for maximizing product value and for the content and order of the product backlog. When the team proposes changes that add value but also add work and affect the schedule, the agile project leader should bring them to the product owner, who weighs the added value against the cost and schedule impact and decides whether and when to include them. This keeps scope decisions with the role that owns them and keeps the team focused on the highest-value work.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Re-estimating the whole project is premature before anyone has decided whether the changes should be made.
- B. Rejecting the changes outright ignores potential value and takes the decision away from the product owner.
- C. Absorbing as many changes as possible without a prioritization decision invites scope creep and overcommitment.
Question 73
An organization initiates a pilot project to introduce agile methodology for the successful delivery of projects.
What should the project manager do to share this project's knowledge and learning with wider organizational business groups?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Regularly meet with people across the organization to share the project's lessons learned and best practices
The goal is to spread what the pilot has learned to business groups that are not part of the project. Meeting regularly with people across the organization to share lessons learned and good practices is a deliberate, ongoing way to transfer that knowledge, and it lets the content be shaped for each audience. It also respects the purpose of the team's own events: the daily stand-up and the retrospective exist for the team to coordinate and to improve itself, and they depend on a safe environment that a large outside audience would disrupt.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Daily stand-ups are short coordination events for the team, and observers from across the organization would learn little and could inhibit open discussion.
- B. Retrospectives depend on psychological safety within the team, and inviting outsiders would discourage candid reflection.
- C. Release meetings and retrospectives serve the team and its stakeholders, and opening them to the whole organization is not an effective way to transfer lessons learned.
Question 74
An organization wants to execute a corporate website redesign project using Scrum. There is an experienced pool of agile team members from a previous project, as well as a pool of available internal team members with some Scrum background.
What should be considered when selecting the team?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Ensure there is a balanced mix of people who are experts and members with broad experience based on the work to be performed and determine training needs.
A Scrum team should be cross-functional, holding all the skills needed to create a valuable increment each sprint. When selecting from both an experienced agile pool and internal staff with some Scrum background, the organization should match skills to the work to be performed, mixing deep specialists with people of broad experience, often described as T-shaped or generalizing specialists. Identifying skill gaps and training needs at the start ensures the team can deliver the website redesign and grow its capability over time.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Screening out anyone with past conflict ignores that healthy conflict is normal and does not ensure the needed skills are present.
- C. Colocation helps communication, but excluding dispersed members is not the primary selection criterion and can remove needed skills.
- D. Velocity is a team measure that is not comparable across projects and should not be used to rate individuals.
Question 75
Prior to a retrospective, discussions among team members indicate conflict. An agile practitioner wants to ensure an open and safe environment during the retrospective.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Review established ground rules with the team
Psychological safety is essential for an effective retrospective, and signs of conflict make it more important to set the stage carefully. Reviewing the team's established ground rules at the start reminds everyone of the behaviors they agreed to, such as listening without interrupting, focusing on issues rather than people and assuming good intent. This frames the discussion, creates an open and safe environment and allows the conflict to be addressed constructively during the retrospective.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Questioning individuals about the cause beforehand can feel like an interrogation and raise tension.
- C. Pressing on with work ignores the conflict and does nothing to create a safe environment.
- D. Taking a team matter to the product owner and stakeholders bypasses the team and reduces trust.
Question 76
A scrum master assumes a project that is essential to organizational growth. The project is expected to be in production for three years.
What should the scrum master do first?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Meet with the stakeholders and enterprise architects to understand the project's vision
For a long-running project that is essential to organizational growth, the scrum master first needs to understand why the project exists and where it is headed. Meeting with stakeholders and enterprise architects reveals the vision, the strategic goals and the architectural constraints that will shape three years of work. This context lets the scrum master coach the team and support the product owner effectively. Building the backlog, planning a sprint 0 or starting a delivery sprint all depend on that shared understanding being in place first.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Building the product backlog with customers is the product owner's work and should follow an understanding of the vision.
- C. Any foundational iteration needs the vision and constraints to be understood before its work can be planned.
- D. Creating a backlog and sprinting immediately risks delivering work that is misaligned with the strategic direction.
Question 77
During a review session, a customer representative is concerned that a story fails to satisfy the scope of work. However, the product owner declares that the scope of work is complete.
What should be done with this story?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Mark it as incomplete and prioritize it for the next sprint
A story is done only when it meets its acceptance criteria and delivers what the customer needs. When the customer representative shows during the review that the story does not satisfy the scope of work, declaring it complete would misreport progress and ignore valid customer feedback. The honest and transparent response is to treat the story as incomplete, return it to the product backlog and have the product owner prioritize the remaining work, typically for the next sprint. This keeps velocity and progress reporting accurate and keeps the customer engaged in defining value.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. The product owner represents the customer and cannot override clear evidence that the agreed scope has not been met.
- C. Discarding the story hides unfinished work and loses the history and effort already invested in it.
- D. The team finishing its tasks does not make the story complete when the customer shows the scope is not satisfied.
Question 78
A product owner, new to the role, is very enthusiastic about an agile project with an energetic team.
What should be done first to ensure successful delivery of the product?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Hold a meeting with the team and the product owner to develop the team charter, working agreement, guiding principles, and product vision
Enthusiasm needs to be channeled into a shared understanding before delivery begins. Bringing the team and the new product owner together to create the team charter, working agreements, guiding principles, and product vision builds alignment on why the product matters, how the team will work, and what success looks like. Because everyone contributes, the result carries collective ownership and buy-in, and the new product owner learns the role alongside the team. This collaborative chartering is the foundation for successful delivery.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Having the product owner write the vision and charter alone loses the team's input and shared ownership.
- C. The team presenting finished artifacts to the product owner excludes the product owner from shaping them.
- D. Formal training may help later, but it delays alignment and does not build shared understanding with the team.
Question 79
The scrum master for a large project must provide an estimate of what can be delivered in six months.
What should the scrum master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Use the team's historical velocity to calculate a range of features that can be delivered
A six-month forecast should rest on empirical data rather than a fixed promise. Using the team's historical velocity, the scrum master can multiply a low and a high velocity by the number of iterations in six months and count down the ordered backlog to show the range of features that is likely to be delivered in that time. A range communicates uncertainty honestly, gives stakeholders useful planning information now, and can be refined each iteration as velocity data accumulates.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Committing to a fixed feature set months ahead ignores uncertainty and adaptive planning.
- B. Refusing an estimate until later withholds useful information that historical data can already provide.
- C. Story point estimates alone cannot predict delivery over time without velocity, and they do not justify a fixed commitment.
Question 80
During a backlog refinement meeting, a senior team member raises a concern about an epic sizing that requires the use of a new interface for a vendor product.
The product owner acknowledges this as a risk.
What should the product owner do now?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Create a spike story to determine what needs to be done to use the new interface
The concern is uncertainty: the team cannot size the epic confidently because it depends on a vendor interface it has not used. A spike is a short, timeboxed piece of research or prototyping added to the backlog to answer exactly this kind of question. The product owner can create and prioritize the spike so the team learns what the interface requires, which reduces the risk early and produces the information needed to size and plan the epic properly. This is the agile way to turn an identified risk into concrete learning.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Logging the risk and waiting for a monthly meeting records the problem without reducing the uncertainty.
- C. Deferring the epic postpones the risk and lets uncertainty, not value, drive the backlog order.
- D. Handing the work to the vendor is a premature decision made before the team understands the effort involved.
Question 81
New stakeholders are joining a project team where the agile coach will educate them about their roles and responsibilities.
How should the stakeholders ensure their objectives are met by product delivery?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Write acceptance criteria for the user stories.
Acceptance criteria state the conditions a user story must satisfy to be accepted, so they are the most direct way for stakeholders to make sure their objectives are built into the product. By contributing to or writing acceptance criteria with the product owner, stakeholders express what success looks like before development starts, the team gains a clear target for design and testing, and the story is verified against those conditions when it is completed. This links stakeholder expectations to delivery throughout the iteration, not only at the end.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Feedback on completed stories arrives after the work is done and reacts to results rather than defining the objectives up front.
- B. How features are implemented is decided by the developers, not by stakeholders.
- C. Stakeholders can propose features, but the product owner decides the content and order of the product backlog.
Question 82
A key resource is switching between projects to obtain more visibility and acclaim. However, project work has grown and become a burden.
What should the agile project leader do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Ask management to ensure that the resource is available to only one project at a time.
Constant switching between projects causes heavy context-switching losses, slows every project the person works on and leads to overload and burnout. Agile favors stable, dedicated team members who focus on one body of work, which keeps flow and velocity predictable. Because resource allocation across projects is an organizational decision, the agile project leader should work with management to make the key resource available to one project at a time. This removes the impediment at its root instead of treating its symptoms.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Adding more people does not stop the key resource from multitasking and creates onboarding overhead of its own.
- B. Time management training puts the burden on the individual while the structural multitasking problem remains.
- D. Letting the switching continue keeps the overload and context-switching waste that are already hurting the work.
Question 83
At the retrospective, the burndown chart shows that the project is slightly behind schedule. The project team identifies an inexperienced software engineer as the source of reduced velocity.
How should the project team address this issue?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Suggest pair programming during the retrospective
The retrospective is the right place for the team to inspect its way of working and agree on improvements. Pair programming, an XP practice, pairs the inexperienced engineer with a more experienced colleague, so knowledge transfers quickly, defects are caught as code is written and the whole team becomes more capable. It addresses the root cause, a skill gap, rather than the symptom, and it reflects collective ownership because the team solves the problem together instead of isolating one person. Over the following iterations velocity should recover as the engineer gains experience.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Reprioritizing user stories does nothing about the skill gap, and backlog order belongs to the product owner rather than the retrospective.
- C. Re-estimating story points changes the numbers on the plan but does not improve the engineer's capability.
- D. Steering easy work to one person limits learning, weakens collective ownership and leaves the gap in place.
Question 84
More details for a story are required before the upcoming sprint planning meeting.
What should the scrum master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Schedule a story grooming session with the product owner before sprint planning
Backlog refinement, often called story grooming, is the ongoing activity in which the product owner and the developers add detail, acceptance criteria and estimates to upcoming product backlog items so they are ready for sprint planning. When a story needs more detail before planning, the scrum master should schedule a grooming session with the product owner and the team. The conversation clarifies the story, answers questions and ensures the team can plan the work with confidence.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Emailing and waiting replaces collaboration with a slow handoff and may leave the story unclear.
- B. The product owner, not the team alone, is accountable for clarifying what the story requires.
- D. Planning poker estimates a story but does not supply the missing details about it.
Question 85
An agile team and a traditional development team are working together on a project. Each team exceeds expectations regarding deliverables; however, issues arise when the deliverables are integrated.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Co-locate the teams to encourage osmotic communication
Both teams perform well on their own, so the integration problems point to a communication gap between them. Co-locating the teams lets members overhear conversations, ask questions as they arise and notice interface mismatches immediately, which is the osmotic communication agile teams rely on. Continuous, informal face-to-face contact surfaces integration concerns as the work is done rather than at hand-off, which is far more effective than occasional formal meetings and fits the agile principle that face-to-face conversation is the most efficient way to convey information.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Periodic cross-organizational meetings add some coordination but leave the gap open between meetings, so issues still surface late.
- B. Merging the teams is a disruptive structural change that the situation does not require, since each team already performs well.
- C. Writing stories from full technical specifications is a document-heavy approach that does not create the ongoing collaboration the teams lack.
Question 86
An agile team member identifies a potential problem within the project team.
How should the team's coach react?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Instruct the team to try to solve the problem within the team
A servant leader coach supports a self-organizing team by encouraging it to own and resolve its own problems. When a team member raises a potential problem within the team, the coach should prompt the team to discuss and solve it together, offering facilitation and guidance where needed rather than taking over. This builds the team's problem-solving capability, keeps the solution close to the people who understand the work, and resolves the issue quickly. Escalation is reserved for impediments the team truly cannot address itself.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Escalating and designing a solution for the team removes ownership and reflects command and control.
- B. Deferring a team problem to a future iteration delays a resolution the team can pursue now.
- D. The coach performing the analysis alone and reporting to the product owner bypasses the team's ability to resolve its own issues.
Question 87
During a planning session, four out of five team members vote to include eight story points in a particular story, while the fifth member votes for five story points.
How should this be handled?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. The story should be assigned points after a discussion with the fifth team member to see if a consensus can be reached
Relative estimation techniques such as planning poker aim for consensus, and the value of a differing estimate lies in the conversation it starts. The team member who voted five may see a simpler approach, or the others may know about complexity that this person has missed. The team should discuss the reasoning behind the differing estimate and, if needed, vote again until it converges on a value everyone accepts. This shared understanding of the story is often more valuable than the number itself.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Taking the majority vote skips the discussion that could reveal important information about the story.
- B. Deferring the story delays planning without resolving the small difference in understanding.
- D. Estimates belong to the people doing the work, not to the customer.
Question 88
The team underestimated the complexity of a story, resulting in new decomposition of the work to be delivered in the current sprint and items to be returned to the backlog.
What should the Scrum Master do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. During the retrospective, discuss the issue and create an action plan to avoid it in the future
The underestimated story has already been handled within the sprint by decomposing the work and returning items to the backlog. The next step for the scrum master is to help the team learn from it: in the sprint retrospective, the scrum master facilitates a discussion of why the complexity was missed, such as unclear stories or insufficient refinement, and the team creates its own action plan to avoid a repeat. This keeps improvement in the team's hands and turns the event into lasting learning.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Routing the issue through a project manager bypasses the scrum team, which owns its own improvement.
- B. Guidelines written by the scrum master are imposed on the team rather than created and owned by it.
- D. Stepping back entirely abandons the scrum master's role of facilitating the team's inspection and adaptation.
Question 89
A product owner has various items in a product backlog and does not know how to prioritize them.
How should the agile practitioner coach the product owner?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Prioritize the most valuable product features in the backlog first.
Value-driven delivery is the main principle for ordering a product backlog: the features that deliver the most value to customers and the business come first. The agile practitioner should coach the product owner to rank items by business value, weighing risk, dependencies and cost against that value with techniques such as MoSCoW or relative value scoring. Putting the highest-value work first maximizes return early, gives stakeholders useful increments sooner, and means that if the project ends early, the most important work has already been done.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Sorting by story points orders the backlog by size, which has no connection to value.
- C. Risk is one factor to weigh, but releasing whatever is riskiest first ignores the value it delivers.
- D. Defining a minimum viable product applies to a launch decision and does not give a method for ordering an existing backlog.
Question 90
A development team for a small company experiences long delays between product completion and release for validation and testing. The company is concerned that this will impact its ability to compete in the marketplace.
What analysis should the team use to understand the issues?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Fishbone diagram
The team already knows the symptom: long delays between product completion and release for validation and testing. To understand the issues behind it, the team needs root cause analysis, and a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram is built for this. It organizes possible causes into categories such as people, process, tools and environment, helping the team move beyond the symptom to the underlying factors that create the delay. Once the causes are understood, the team can target improvements that shorten the time to market.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Risk management deals with uncertain future events, while the delays are a current problem that needs causal analysis.
- B. Variance and trend analysis shows how far performance deviates from plan and how it changes over time, but it does not explain why the delays occur.
- C. The Kano model classifies features by their effect on customer satisfaction and does not analyze process delays.
Question 91
The agile practitioner has determined that two different team members are working on addressing the same major issue on the project.
How should the agile practitioner address this?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Conduct a root-cause analysis on the issue and identify related risks and risk response owners at the next retrospective
Two team members working on the same major issue is a symptom of a process gap, such as unclear ownership of issues or of the risks behind them. Rather than patching this one instance, the agile practitioner brings it to the retrospective, where the team conducts a root-cause analysis, identifies related risks and agrees who owns each risk response. Naming risk response owners makes accountability for major issues explicit, so effort is not duplicated again, and because the team itself finds the cause and agrees on the fix, the improvement reflects inspect and adapt and lasts.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A burnup chart tracks scope and completed work and does nothing to explain or prevent two people duplicating effort on the same issue.
- B. Assigning the issue to one person is a command decision by the practitioner that leaves the cause of the duplication unexamined.
- D. Asking for allocation principles without first understanding why the duplication happened risks rules that miss the actual cause.
Question 92
An agile project leader notices that the team's velocity has decreased. In examining data provided by team members, the project leader discovers that one team member has been slow to enter story statuses.
What can happen as a result?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. The team cannot give accurate updates to management
Velocity and status figures are calculated from the story statuses that team members record. When one member is slow to enter those statuses, completed work is missing from the data, so velocity appears lower than it really is, as the project leader observed. Any status or forecast the team reports to management is then built on inaccurate numbers, which can mislead management about progress and lead to poor decisions. Timely updates keep the recorded data, and therefore the reports drawn from it, accurate.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Team members still learn the iteration's real status through the daily scrum and direct collaboration, so the lag mainly distorts the recorded data.
- B. Design validity is judged through technical work, testing, and feedback, not through the timeliness of status entries.
- D. Team collaboration is not measured by story status entries, so this is not the consequence described.
Question 93
During the implementation of a story, a scrum team notifies the scrum master of a technical challenge that is causing a delay.
What should the scrum master advise the team to do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Create a spike to finalize the story's technical approach
A spike is a short, time-boxed piece of research or prototyping used to reduce technical uncertainty before committing to an approach. When a technical challenge is delaying a story, the scrum master should coach the team to run a spike so it can explore options, learn quickly and settle the technical approach. The outcome of the spike lets the team implement the story with confidence and produce better estimates, which reduces the risk of rework and wasted effort from pushing ahead on an unproven design.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Pushing ahead with implementation while the technical approach is unresolved invites rework and quality problems.
- C. Handing the story to another team creates a dependency and prevents this team from building its own capability.
- D. Deprioritizing the story and waiting does nothing to resolve the uncertainty, which only the team's investigation will reduce.
Question 94
During planning sessions, an agile practitioner notices that some team members do not share common ideas.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Ask the team if they would like to adopt alternative techniques
When team members are not converging on shared ideas during planning, the agile practitioner should involve the team in solving the problem rather than imposing a fix. Asking whether they would like to try alternative techniques, such as different estimation or brainstorming methods, structured facilitation or affinity grouping, respects self-organization and invites the team to experiment with ways of working that help them align. Addressing it now, with the team's ownership, improves planning sessions immediately instead of waiting.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Imposing a norms document sets rules for the team instead of letting it choose how to improve.
- C. The stand-up is not a forum for resolving planning issues, and the issue is not the scrum master's alone to fix.
- D. Waiting until the end of the iteration delays help with a problem that affects planning now.
Question 95
During an iteration, an urgent customer request for support reaches the team. If they work on it, the team's commitments in this iteration are at risk.
What should the team do next?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Work with the product owner to assess the impact for reprioritization.
The product owner is accountable for ordering work by value, so an urgent request that threatens the iteration's commitments is a trade-off for the product owner to decide with the team. By assessing the impact together, the team gives the product owner what is needed to decide whether the request displaces planned work, waits, or justifies changing the iteration's scope. The team stays transparent about the consequences, the customer's need gets a timely, deliberate answer, and the team keeps a sustainable pace.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Working overtime breaks the sustainable pace and hides the real trade-off instead of resolving it.
- B. Handing the request to another team sidesteps prioritization and assumes that team has the capacity and context.
- D. Deciding unilaterally to defer an urgent request skips the product owner's prioritization and may leave the customer waiting too long.
Question 96
Which agile practice would most significantly increase a team's velocity?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Training in areas of weakness
Velocity reflects how much work a team can actually complete each iteration, so the most direct way to raise it is to improve the team's capability. Training in the areas where the team is weak removes skill bottlenecks, reduces rework and defects, and lets more members take on more kinds of work, which builds cross-functional, generalizing specialists. The other practices support coordination, planning and reflection, but they do not by themselves increase the team's ability to produce working product. Building skills turns the improvements identified elsewhere into real gains in throughput.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Daily standups coordinate the work and expose impediments, but they do not increase the team's capability.
- B. Iteration and release planning organizes and forecasts the work but does not change how fast the team can complete it.
- D. Retrospectives identify improvements, but the skill gap itself still has to be closed through training before velocity rises significantly.
Question 97
Stakeholders have conflicting requirements, and the product owner is struggling to decide which user stories to write.
What should the product owner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Ask the agile practitioner to facilitate a story-writing workshop
When stakeholders' requirements conflict, the product owner needs a shared forum where those views can be surfaced, discussed and reconciled. A story-writing workshop brings the stakeholders, product owner and team together to build user stories collaboratively. The agile practitioner, acting as a neutral servant leader, is well placed to facilitate it: they keep the discussion balanced, make sure every voice is heard and help the group reach agreement. The product owner still owns the resulting backlog, but the decisions are now informed by a common understanding instead of competing demands.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Having the agile practitioner write the stories takes product decisions away from the product owner and stakeholders and leaves the conflict unresolved.
- B. The team takes part in the workshop, but facilitating stakeholder conflict resolution is the agile practitioner's role.
- C. Subject matter experts add detail but cannot settle conflicting stakeholder priorities on their own.
Question 98
An agile practitioner wants to ensure that stakeholders have current information about a project's progress.
What should the agile practitioner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Post a project board in an area where all can view it
A project board posted where everyone can see it is an information radiator: a highly visible display of current progress that anyone can consult at any time without asking the team or opening a report. Because the team updates it as work moves, stakeholders always see the latest state, which supports transparency and invites conversation. This is the agile way to keep stakeholders informed with minimal overhead and without disturbing the team's own events.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Circulating detailed plans is heavyweight, quickly outdated, and seldom read closely.
- B. A repository update relies on stakeholders going to look and is less visible than a radiator.
- C. The daily standup is for the team to coordinate its work, not a status meeting for stakeholders.
Question 99
During a project's last iteration, an agile team struggled with a feature's delivery due to the lack of a required skill. The project has already incurred a five-day delay. A further delay of at least 10 days is anticipated.
What should the agile project leader have done to avoid this situation?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Ensured that the team was comprised of cross-functional, generalized specialists
The delay arose because the team lacked a skill needed for a feature, a dependency that should be prevented when the team is formed. Agile teams are designed to be cross-functional, containing all the skills required to deliver the product, and are built from generalizing specialists who have a primary expertise plus broader abilities that let them step into other work as demand shifts. Ensuring this composition from the start avoids single points of failure and bottlenecks that cause schedule slips late in a project.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Just-in-time training reacts after the gap appears and still costs time, rather than preventing it through team composition.
- B. Lowering the priority of a needed feature only defers the problem and delays value the customer requires.
- C. Handing the feature to another team creates dependencies and disrupts both teams rather than building the needed capability.
Question 100
Agile team A struggles to deliver committed stories due to technical dependencies with team B, which continuously fails to meet its delivery commitments.
What should the agile team lead do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Swap team members from both teams so that deliveries are better supported
Team A is repeatedly blocked by technical dependencies on team B, which keeps missing its commitments. Swapping members between the two teams places people with knowledge of each side's work inside the other team, so dependencies are understood earlier, handoffs shrink and team A gains capability to support the work it relies on. This cross-pollination addresses the root cause of the delays, the coupling and knowledge gap between the teams, through collaboration rather than blame.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Creating a new team and placing team B under performance management is punitive and adds further handoffs.
- B. A vision session improves shared purpose but does not resolve the technical dependency that blocks delivery.
- D. Renegotiating timelines accepts the delays and does nothing to improve how the teams deliver the dependent work.
Question 101
A new product owner needs to manage the backlog of a high-visibility, fast-moving project that is consuming a considerable amount of time.
What should the product owner do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Seek regular input from project stakeholders, and reflect this input in the backlog's priorities
In a high-visibility, fast-moving project, priorities shift quickly, and the product owner's core accountability is maximizing value through the ordering of the product backlog. Seeking regular input from stakeholders and reflecting that input in backlog priorities keeps the backlog aligned with business needs as they evolve, and it lets the product owner manage a time-consuming backlog by focusing effort on what matters most. Frequent stakeholder collaboration also builds trust and transparency, which is especially important when many people are watching the outcome.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Refinement with the team does not address the need here, because writing and sizing stories does not tell the product owner what stakeholders value most.
- B. Story points measure size or effort rather than value, so ordering by the largest estimates does not deliver the most value first.
- D. Monthly progress reviews are too infrequent for a fast-moving project and focus on status rather than on shaping backlog priorities.
Question 102
How can a scrum team obtain more feedback from a minimally responsive outside stakeholder?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Keep sprints short
Each sprint ends with a sprint review in which stakeholders see the increment and give feedback. Keeping sprints short produces more of these reviews in a given period, so a stakeholder who engages only occasionally still has frequent, small, concrete opportunities to react. Shorter feedback loops let the team learn and adjust sooner, and each review asks for less of the stakeholder's time, which makes it easier for a busy person to stay involved.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. The daily scrum is a working event for the developers and gives an outside stakeholder little to react to.
- C. Estimates come from the people doing the work, and asking a stakeholder for them neither fits their role nor produces feedback on the product.
- D. Scrum has one review at the end of each sprint, so more frequent review points come from shorter sprints rather than extra demos within one.
Question 103
Team A is working on the second sprint of a product release. Team B, which is an interdependent team located on the same floor, requires exclusive and frequent information to complete its sprint goal.
What should the agile team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Use an information board that will be visible to all passing through the workspace
Team B sits on the same floor and needs frequent, current information from team A. An information radiator, a large visible board in the shared workspace, displays status and key information continuously so team B can see what it needs at any time without asking or searching. This is a low-effort, high-visibility way to support transparency and coordination between interdependent co-located teams, and it keeps the information up to date as team A works.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A central repository requires team B to go looking for information instead of seeing it at a glance.
- C. Status emails to all stakeholders are slow, easily missed and not aimed at team B's frequent needs.
- D. Sharing only when asked creates delays and makes team B wait on team A.
Question 104
A globally distributed project team is using email and phone calls as the only way to share information. Delays in resolving issues often occur due to misinterpreted communications, leading to a lower team velocity.
What steps should the project leader take to improve knowledge sharing?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Establish a live video feed between the dispersed teams to enable spontaneous engagement and collaboration on issues
Relying only on email and phone calls removes the rich, immediate interaction that prevents misunderstandings. For dispersed teams, the Agile Practice Guide describes a fishbowl window, a long-lived video link between locations that stays open through the workday. People can see one another and talk spontaneously, raising and resolving issues as they arise. This recreates much of the benefit of co-location, reduces misinterpretation and collaboration lag, and helps restore the team's velocity.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Relaying information through the leader and status reports adds hand-offs that make misinterpretation more likely.
- C. Co-location is not the only way to achieve agility, and asking the customer to relocate a global team is rarely realistic.
- D. Reporting lower velocity to the customer accepts the problem without improving how the team shares knowledge.
Question 105
An event management team is following an agile approach to prepare for an upcoming conference. The regional sales manager, from where the conference is to be held, contacts the team with a number of questions about the company's booth.
What should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Stay focused on the current iteration and let the project manager deal with the regional sales manager's questions
The regional sales manager's questions about the booth arrive in the middle of an iteration and would pull team members away from their committed work. In an agile approach, the project manager acts as a servant leader who shields the team from interruptions and manages stakeholder communication. The team should stay focused on the current iteration and let the project manager handle the questions, answering them, involving the product owner if new needs emerge, and inviting the sales manager to future reviews where that is appropriate. This protects the team's focus while still treating the stakeholder's interest seriously.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Labeling a stakeholder as disruptive and restricting questions to a weekly meeting damages the relationship and is not collaborative.
- C. Issuing a review invitation does not answer the current questions, and arranging stakeholder engagement belongs to the project manager or product owner rather than the team.
- D. Logging a speculative risk leaves the questions unanswered and does nothing to manage the stakeholder.
Question 106
A scrum team has eight developers, but only two are database engineers. During the last few retrospectives, the team identified that most sprint stories are dependent upon database engineers. This has created a bottleneck in completing stories.
What should be proposed to the team?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Have other team developers attend training to learn database skills
A recurring bottleneck caused by only two database engineers shows the team is not cross-functional enough for its work. Proposing that other developers train in database skills builds T-shaped team members who can share the load, reduces dependency on specialists and increases the team's flow and resilience. The issue has already surfaced in several retrospectives, so it is time to act on the root cause rather than wait or reduce delivery.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. The bottleneck has already been confirmed over several retrospectives, so further waiting only prolongs it.
- C. Planning fewer stories treats the symptom and lowers delivery without removing the skill dependency.
- D. Removing valuable stories because of a team skill gap sacrifices customer value instead of fixing the team's capability.
Question 107
After seeing the planned features for an upcoming release, a customer notes that a vitally important and complex one is missing. The team estimates that this feature significantly exceeds its average velocity.
How can this issue be resolved?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Break down the feature into smaller parts, and commit to completing the minimum viable product
A feature too large to fit within the team's velocity should be decomposed into smaller, independently valuable parts. The team can then deliver the most essential slice, the minimum viable product of that feature, within the release and add the remaining capability incrementally. This responds to the customer's vital need, keeps work within demonstrated capacity and allows feedback on the early slices to shape what follows. Slicing large work is the standard agile way to deliver value early without breaking timeboxes.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Deferring the entire feature to a later release ignores a vital customer need, and the feature would still be too large without slicing.
- C. Dropping every other planned feature in favor of an oversized one discards planned value and still leaves the feature too big to finish.
- D. Iterations are fixed timeboxes, and extending one breaks the cadence instead of right-sizing the work.
Question 108
How can an agile team working on a new product ensure alignment with external stakeholders?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Conduct story-mapping exercises to clarify deliverables and release priorities
Story mapping arranges user activities and stories along the user's journey and slices them into releases, giving everyone a shared visual picture of what will be delivered and in what order. Running story-mapping exercises with external stakeholders lets them see the deliverables, discuss trade-offs, and agree on release priorities together with the team. This collaborative and visual approach creates alignment around value and scope far more effectively than documents or role assignments, and the map can be revisited as understanding grows.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A detailed specification document is a one-way, upfront artifact that does not create shared understanding with external stakeholders.
- C. Assigning roles and responsibilities at kickoff organizes the team but does not align stakeholders on deliverables or priorities.
- D. Following agile principles concerns process, not agreement with stakeholders on what the product will deliver and when.
Question 109
A company president is concerned about the impact of a natural disaster on the company.
How should management identify areas to apply its resources and mitigate potential impacts?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Establish and keep an active risk register based on qualitative risk analysis and expected losses
To decide where to apply resources against a natural disaster, management first has to know which exposures matter most. An active risk register built on qualitative risk analysis ranks each risk by probability and impact, and expressing impact as expected losses shows the size of each exposure in business terms. Together these identify the areas where mitigation resources will protect the most value. Keeping the register active means it is reviewed and updated as conditions change, so resource decisions continue to reflect the current picture of risk.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Recording mitigation strategies and their costs and benefits comes after the risks have been ranked, so it does not by itself identify where exposure is greatest.
- C. An information radiator of development risks covers team-level work items, not company-wide exposure to a natural disaster.
- D. Splitting teams across locations is a single response chosen without analysis and does not identify where resources should be applied across the company.
Question 110
An executive sponsor of a new scrum team actively attends scrum ceremonies.
How does this benefit the team?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. It helps to quickly resolve issues using the sponsor's influence
An engaged executive sponsor brings organizational authority that the team does not have. When the sponsor sees the work and hears about impediments firsthand at scrum events, the sponsor can act quickly on blockers that sit outside the team's control, such as funding, staffing, cross-department dependencies, or policy constraints. Faster removal of these organizational impediments is the direct benefit to the team, and it complements the scrum master's role of surfacing and escalating issues that the team cannot resolve on its own.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Focus on the sprint goal comes from the team's own commitment and the scrum master's facilitation, not from a sponsor attending events.
- B. Reminding the team who funds the project adds no value to the team's delivery.
- C. High-level updates benefit the sponsor rather than the team, which is what the question asks about.
Question 111
A new CIO advocates an agile framework for new IT projects, but the team has reservations.
How should the CIO ensure that the team will be aligned with this?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Obtain executive team buy-in by conducting a meeting to present the advantages of agile principles and processes
Agile adoption succeeds only when leadership supports it, because executives set the priorities, funding, governance and reward systems teams work within. Executive sponsorship is a key condition for an agile transformation. By presenting the advantages of agile principles and processes to the executive team and obtaining their buy-in, the CIO secures visible, consistent support from the top. Managers can then remove organizational obstacles, and the team sees that the change is backed and lasting, which eases their reservations and aligns them with the new way of working.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. A memo mandating agile imposes the change from the top and tends to deepen resistance.
- C. Running agile as an experiment without leadership backing leaves the team unsure the change will last and without support to remove organizational obstacles.
- D. Compulsory training with an order to comply relies on mandate rather than building genuine team alignment.
Question 112
When introducing agile processes to a company, a quality assurance (QA) manager resists and believes that the switch to agile will remove quality controls and documents.
How should the agile practitioner address this concern?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Educate the QA manager that in agile, quality is integrated from the beginning to end of the project
The QA manager's resistance comes from a misconception, so the agile practitioner should address it through education and coaching. In agile, quality is built in throughout the work rather than inspected at the end: acceptance criteria and the definition of done set quality expectations for every item, and practices such as test-driven development, continuous integration, automated testing, and frequent reviews provide continuous quality control. Documentation that adds value is still produced. Explaining this helps the QA manager see that controls are not removed but embedded and applied earlier and more often.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Adding QA wording to backlog items does not address the manager's misunderstanding of how agile handles quality.
- C. Existing QA documents are not technical debt, and moving them into a debt backlog misrepresents their purpose.
- D. Quality is a shared responsibility, and handing tests and controls to the product owner neither reflects agile practice nor answers the concern.
Question 113
Which option describes how risk should be managed in an agile project?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. All stakeholders are responsible for identifying risks during standups, retrospectives, and other team meetings.
Agile teams treat risk management as a shared, continuous activity rather than the job of one person. Everyone involved can surface threats and opportunities, and the regular cadence of daily standups, sprint reviews, retrospectives and refinement sessions provides frequent chances to identify risks while they are still small. Once identified, risks are made visible and their responses are prioritized alongside other work, often as items in a risk-adjusted backlog. Spreading identification across all stakeholders draws on the widest range of knowledge and avoids blind spots that arise when responsibility is concentrated in a single role.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Agile methods reduce some risks through short feedback loops, but they do not remove the need to actively identify and respond to risk.
- B. Limiting each person to the risks of their own stories fragments risk management and misses risks that cut across the product or project.
- D. The product owner prioritizes risk responses in the backlog, but identification is not a single-role duty and relies on the whole team and stakeholders.
Question 114
A project team identifies a number of technical challenges with features in the next sprint.
What should they do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Determine who is best qualified to address the challenges
Agile teams are self-organizing: the developers decide how to accomplish the work they have taken on. When technical challenges appear in upcoming features, the team should determine among themselves who is best qualified to address each challenge, drawing on the collective skills of the group and pairing or swarming where it helps. This keeps ownership with the people closest to the work and reflects the principle that the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Seeking direction from a technical manager reverts to command and control and bypasses the team's responsibility for how the work is done.
- B. Pushing the features to another sprint avoids the challenge and overrides the product owner's ordering for reasons the team can handle itself.
- D. The product owner orders the backlog but does not assign tasks; the developers decide who does what.
Question 115
During mid-sprint changes, an agile facilitator meets with the executive and development teams. During the meeting, executive team members resolve conflicts, and on their own initiative, review the iteration charts to discuss changes to the iteration's functional goal.
What practice is the agile facilitator implementing?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Using active stakeholder involvement to build features in an incremental and iterative approach
The executives are not passive recipients of status reports: on their own initiative they examine the iteration charts and discuss changes to the iteration's functional goal with the development team. That is active stakeholder involvement in shaping what is built, which is central to iterative and incremental delivery. By bringing executives and developers together during the iteration, the agile facilitator lets stakeholders influence the features in each increment as they learn, so the product evolves with their needs instead of being fixed in advance.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Visible status is only the means here, since the executives go further and take part in shaping the iteration's functional goal.
- B. The executives resolve their own conflicts, so the facilitator is not the one facilitating that resolution.
- D. The executives are not just giving feedback but actively deciding on changes to the features being built.
Question 116
Why should a project team reduce the work in progress?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. It represents unrealized value
Work in progress is effort that has been invested but has not yet produced anything the customer can use, so it represents unrealized value. Lean thinking treats partially done work as waste because it ties up capacity, hides problems and delays feedback. Reducing work in progress, often through explicit WIP limits, shortens cycle time, exposes bottlenecks and lets the team finish items and deliver value sooner. The aim is to stop starting and start finishing, turning invested effort into delivered value as quickly as possible.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The amount of work in progress is a flow measure and does not by itself indicate the quality of the product.
- B. Work in progress shows how much work is started but unfinished, not how busy individual team members are.
- D. Work in progress is not a schedule variance measure and does not show whether the project is behind schedule.
Question 117
A product owner with experience in a predictive approach wants the team to develop very detailed schedules and cost estimates for the next 10 sprints.
What should the Scrum Master do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Invite the product owner to the retrospective to explain the team's approach to schedule and budget
The product owner is a member of the Scrum Team, and the sprint retrospective is where the whole team inspects how it works, including its processes, tools and interactions. Inviting the product owner into that conversation lets the team explain its empirical approach to schedule and budget: planning near-term work in detail, forecasting later work from actual velocity and adapting as it learns. Discussing this together builds shared understanding and lets the product owner raise the need for predictability, so the team can agree on a planning approach everyone supports.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Narrowing the horizon to two sprints still asks for detailed upfront schedules and costs, and it does not help the product owner understand the team's empirical approach.
- B. Spending sprints on detailed long-range plans delays value and produces plans that will soon be outdated.
- D. Agile teams still forecast schedules and budgets at a suitable level of detail, so a flat statement like this misleads the product owner and does nothing to build shared understanding.
Question 118
On an agile project, some of the development team is struggling to understand how the tasks and user stories fit into the overall product.
How should this be addressed?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Have the product owner explain the product vision and review the release plan with the team
Developers who cannot see how their tasks and stories fit into the overall product are missing the big picture. The product owner is accountable for the product vision and for the ordering of the work, so having the product owner explain the vision and walk the team through the release plan gives them the context they need. Knowing the product goal and how upcoming releases build toward it lets the team connect individual stories to the outcome and make better decisions while working on them.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Reviewing iteration goals keeps the focus on the current iteration and does not show how the work contributes to the overall product.
- B. A story map limited to minimum viable product functionality covers only part of the product and does not convey the broader vision.
- C. Waiting for the retrospective delays the fix, and more task detail at planning does not supply the missing product context.
Question 119
In companies where decision making is driven by data analytics and unknown variables are addressed, what advantages does agile project execution offer over a predictive approach?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. A formalized agile approach offers controlled flexibility in dealing with unknown variables in a manner that adds business value.
Agile approaches are designed for environments with high uncertainty. Short iterations, frequent feedback and backlog reprioritization give controlled flexibility: the team adjusts to new data and unknown variables in a disciplined, timeboxed way, and it keeps focusing on the work that delivers the most business value. In an organization that makes decisions from data analytics, this lets insights feed straight into the next increment. A predictive approach, which tries to fix requirements up front, deals with emerging information far less effectively.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Agile is not limited to digital transformation; it applies wherever uncertainty is high, whatever the industry.
- C. Agile handles change through backlog reprioritization and feedback, not a formal change management system.
- D. How new a method is says nothing about whether it fits data-driven work.
Question 120
A scrum master would like to provide information to key stakeholders on the daily resource and project activities.
Which tool should the Scrum master use to provide these updates?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. Iteration burndown chart
An iteration burndown chart plots the work remaining in the current iteration against the days of the iteration and is updated daily. It is an information radiator that shows stakeholders, at a glance, whether the team is on track to finish the iteration's work and how effort is being consumed day by day. That daily granularity matches the need to report on daily resource and project activities. Other tools describe direction, long-term release progress or historical trends rather than what is happening within the current iteration each day.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A shared vision and sprint goal describe intent and direction, not daily progress or activity.
- B. A release burnup chart tracks completed scope across many iterations rather than daily activity within one.
- C. Velocity metrics summarize completed work per iteration and are used for forecasting, not daily status.
Question 121
A company has decided to use an agile delivery method for launching a new product to improve the customer checkout experience.
How should the project manager ensure the experienced predictive delivery teams are capable of adopting the agile model?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Organize training and development workshops to help all stakeholders to form a shared understanding of agile practices.
A successful move from predictive to agile delivery depends on shared understanding, not just new job titles. Training and development workshops for all stakeholders, including the teams, the business and the customer-facing roles, build a common grasp of agile values, practices and expectations. That shared mindset lets experienced predictive practitioners apply what they already know in an adaptive way, and it keeps stakeholders from pulling the teams back toward old habits. Bringing everyone along together reduces resistance and makes the adoption last.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Assigning roles and giving role-by-role training builds silos instead of a shared agile mindset.
- C. A leadership-only transformation plan leaves the delivery teams and other stakeholders unprepared.
- D. Limiting agile to a few deliverables handled by agile veterans does not prepare the existing teams to adopt it.
Question 122
Stakeholders are displeased with the latest release of a product's software. While most stakeholders attended every sprint review, they were otherwise largely uninvolved in the project.
What should the agile practitioner have done to ensure stakeholder satisfaction?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Ensured engagement among stakeholders and the product owner
Attending sprint reviews is not the same as being engaged. Because the stakeholders were otherwise uninvolved, their needs and changing expectations did not reach the product owner often enough to shape the product backlog. The agile practitioner should have fostered continuous engagement between stakeholders and the product owner, through backlog refinement sessions, regular conversations, and involvement in prioritization, so that feedback was incorporated throughout delivery. Ongoing collaboration with the customer is what produces a release that stakeholders value.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Following a communications matrix pushes information out but does not create the two-way engagement that was missing.
- C. Stakeholders already attended every review, so more demos would not fix their lack of involvement in shaping the product.
- D. Prioritizing with the product owner alone excludes the stakeholders, whose missing input caused the dissatisfaction.
Question 123
A project team member expresses frustration about the length of time it takes to make decisions for a complex project. Approvals need to happen at many levels in the company.
What should the team lead do to improve decision quality and reduce the time required to make decisions?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Make sure the project owner is fully embedded into the project team so that they are readily available to make quick decisions.
Long decision chains create waiting time and dilute understanding of the work. Embedding the product owner in the team places a single empowered decision maker for the product right where questions arise, so priorities and requirement questions are answered quickly and with full context. Frequent, direct collaboration also improves decision quality because the product owner sees the work as it develops and the team understands the reasoning behind each decision. This reflects the agile emphasis on business people and developers working together daily.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Organization-wide group decision making adds participants and coordination, which tends to slow decisions further.
- C. Routing every decision to the sponsor creates a bottleneck and keeps decisions far from the work.
- D. The scrum master does not own product decisions, so giving that role approval authority confuses accountabilities.
Question 124
A product owner for two highly visible projects spends a great deal of time meeting with and reporting to senior stakeholders. The product owner is overwhelmed because both project teams request clarification on the requirements and the overall priorities.
What should the agile project manager do?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Facilitate a meeting with each team and the product owner to find a solution
The product owner cannot give either team enough time for clarification, which is an impediment to both teams. As a servant leader, the agile project manager should not replace the product owner or invent a workaround alone, but should facilitate a meeting between the product owner and each team so they can agree on a solution together. Options might include regular refinement sessions, delegating some stakeholder reporting, or appointing proxy product owners. Facilitated collaboration respects the product owner's role while restoring the team's access to timely decisions on requirements and priorities.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The project manager does not own priorities, and handing down needs does not give the teams ongoing clarification.
- B. Written questions delay answers and replace the conversation that agile teams rely on.
- D. Documentation cannot substitute for the product owner's active clarification of requirements and priorities.
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