PMI · Free Practice Questions · Last reviewed May 2026
24 real exam-style questions organised by domain, each with the correct answer highlighted and a plain-English explanation of why it's right — and why the others are wrong.
The project stakeholders are unhappy because the delivered features do not align with the current organizational priorities. What should the practitioner do first?
Ask the team to work overtime to finish the backlog faster.
Update the release burn-down chart to reflect current progress.
Conduct a backlog grooming session with stakeholders to reprioritize based on business value.
Backlog grooming directly restores alignment by re-ranking items against current business value, satisfying the stem's constraint that delivered features no longer match organisational priorities. Engaging stakeholders in that session ensures the revised order reflects their priorities, so subsequent iterations deliver the highest-value work first.
Change the definition of done to speed up delivery.
An agile team is coordinating tasks across multiple cross-functional teams. Which meeting is most effective for synchronizing dependencies?
Sprint Retrospective.
Daily Stand-up.
Scrum of Scrums.
Scrum of Scrums directly addresses cross-team dependency synchronisation by having each team's representative report progress, impediments and upcoming inter-team dependencies. This satisfies the stem's multi-team coordination constraint, unlike single-team ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, which cannot surface or resolve dependencies spanning several cross-functional teams.
Sprint Planning.
During sprint planning, a team discovers that their velocity has decreased by 20% over the last two iterations. What should the team do first?
Increase the story point estimates to account for the decrease.
Reduce the team size to improve communication overhead.
Review the retrospective notes from the last two sprints to identify systemic blockers.
Reviewing retrospective notes targets the root cause of the 20% velocity drop by surfacing systemic blockers, such as unresolved impediments or process friction, rather than reacting to the symptom. This satisfies the stem's "first" constraint: inspect before adapting, consistent with the Agile principle of reflecting and adjusting at regular intervals.
Commit to the same number of story points to pressure the team to improve.
A team is coordinating releases across three different scrum teams working on the same product. Which THREE practices should be utilized?
Require every team to report directly to the Portfolio Manager for daily tasks.
Assign a single Product Owner to maintain a unified product backlog.
One Product Owner with a single unified backlog gives all three teams a shared priority order, preventing divergent roadmaps. This satisfies the coordination constraint by aligning what each team builds toward one product vision rather than competing backlogs.
Mandate that each team has a different iteration length to avoid meeting conflicts.
Hold a joint refinement session to ensure shared understanding of cross-team dependencies.
Joint refinement lets members of all three teams discuss shared backlog items together, exposing dependencies and interface assumptions early. This satisfies the coordination constraint by building cross-team shared understanding before work begins, reducing integration surprises during release.
Use a Scrum of Scrums (SoS) to synchronize cross-team dependencies.
A Scrum of Scrums convenes representatives from each team to surface and resolve cross-team dependencies and impediments regularly. This satisfies the synchronisation constraint by creating a dedicated forum where inter-team blockers are raised and coordinated before they delay releases.
An organization is moving from project-based to product-based funding. How should the agile practitioner advise the team to measure success?
Report primarily on task completion percentages from the Jira dashboard.
Utilize value-based metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Product-based funding shifts investment decisions to outcome delivery, so value-based metrics such as Net Promoter Score and Customer Acquisition Cost measure realised customer and business value rather than schedule or budget adherence, matching the stem's funding-model change.
Track the number of features delivered per quarter.
Focus on budget adherence and total project spend.
A cross-functional team is experiencing long lead times for feature delivery. Which TWO actions would help optimize the end-to-end flow?
Outsource the testing phase to a specialized third-party vendor.
Map the value stream to identify and eliminate non-value-added activities.
Value stream mapping exposes every step between request and delivery, revealing queues, handoffs and rework that inflate lead time. Eliminating those non-value-added activities directly shortens the end-to-end flow the stem describes, rather than optimising individual functions in isolation.
Add a quality assurance gate at the end of the development lifecycle.
Increase the frequency of daily stand-ups to two times per day.
Implement a strict Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit.
Limiting WIP caps concurrent work, forcing the team to finish items before starting new ones. This directly shortens lead time by reducing queueing and context switching, the primary causes of delay in the end-to-end flow. Little's Law confirms that lower WIP at constant throughput yields proportionally faster delivery.
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Practice this domainHow can a leader best promote self-organization within an agile team?
Attend every technical meeting to provide guidance.
Require all decisions to be approved by the leadership team.
Create detailed task lists for every team member.
Define the objective and let the team decide how to achieve it.
Self-organisation grows when the leader sets the goal and boundaries but leaves method and task allocation to the team. This grants autonomy over how work is done, which is the mechanism that builds genuine self-organisation.
A team member is consistently negative during meetings. As a leader, what is your first step?
Ignore the behavior, as it will resolve itself.
Discuss the behavior with them privately to understand the root cause.
Addressing the negativity privately first uncovers the root cause, whether personal stress, unresolved conflict or genuine technical concern. This preserves psychological safety and avoids public confrontation, letting the leader respond to the actual driver rather than merely suppressing the visible behaviour during meetings.
Call them out during the daily stand-up.
Ask the team to vote on whether to keep them in the squad.
A team is consistently missing their sprint goals. What is the most effective way to empower the team to improve?
Assign a mentor to watch every task developers perform.
Facilitate a root-cause analysis in the retrospective to identify process blockers.
A retrospective root-cause analysis lets the team itself identify why sprint goals are missed, addressing process blockers rather than blaming individuals. This empowers self-organisation, the agile principle behind continuous improvement, instead of imposing external fixes.
Analyze the velocity data and set higher targets for the next sprint.
Replace the team members who are underperforming.
Your team has high technical skill but lacks collaboration, with members working in silos. Which technique is most effective to foster a collaborative culture?
Set up a shared document repository for everyone to read.
Implement individual performance bonuses for the fastest developers.
Introduce mob programming sessions for complex stories.
Mob programming forces the whole team onto one keyboard, one screen and one problem, so knowledge and decisions are shared continuously rather than hoarded in silos. This directly attacks the collaboration gap, which technical skill alone cannot fix.
Require daily status reports from every developer.
A stakeholder requests a major change to the sprint backlog mid-sprint. How do you respond as an agile leader?
Ask the developers to work overtime to accommodate the request.
Reject the request immediately as it violates the sprint commitment.
Ask the Product Owner to discuss the impact with the stakeholder and evaluate if the goal can still be met.
The Product Owner owns backlog ordering and stakeholder negotiation, so routing the mid-sprint change request through them preserves the sprint goal. They assess impact against committed work and decide whether the goal remains achievable, satisfying the stem's constraint of protecting the sprint.
Add the work to the sprint backlog immediately.
During a retrospective, two senior team members disagree on the technical architecture for a new feature, leading to a standstill. How should you facilitate this?
Make the decision yourself to prevent further delay.
Ask the product owner to decide the architecture.
Vote on the approaches and go with the majority.
Suggest a time-boxed experiment to test both approaches and compare outcomes.
A time-boxed experiment converts an opinion-based standstill into empirical comparison: both architectures are tested against agreed criteria, and the team decides on evidence. This satisfies the retrospective constraint by resolving the disagreement without escalation or seniority-based override, preserving team ownership.
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Practice this domainA team is consistently missing sprint goals because they over-commit. What is the most Agile-aligned response?
Stop doing retrospectives to save time for coding.
Assign tasks to members by seniority to ensure speed.
Increase the sprint length to provide more time.
Use historical velocity to guide future capacity planning.
Historical velocity provides an empirical, team-derived baseline for how much work fits a sprint, replacing optimistic guesswork with data. This directly addresses the over-commitment constraint while preserving Agile self-management, unlike imposing external estimates or extending sprint length.
An Agile team is experiencing low morale due to excessive micromanagement. What is the servant leader's primary role here?
Tell the team they must adapt to the manager's style.
Report the team for lack of productivity.
Become the manager and direct all work.
Act as a buffer to prevent external interference.
A servant leader shields the team from external pressures and interference, restoring autonomy and morale. Acting as a buffer directly counters the micromanagement causing low morale, satisfying the stem's requirement for the servant leader's primary role in this situation.
The team is stuck in a 'blame game' after a failed release. How do you facilitate a transition to an Agile mindset?
Facilitate a blame-free post-mortem focused on process gaps.
A blame-free post-mortem redirects attention from individual fault to systemic process gaps, which is the specific mechanism that shifts the team toward Agile's empirical, improvement-driven mindset. Addressing the root causes of the failed release satisfies the stem's need to break the blame cycle and restore psychological safety.
Disband the team and create new ones.
Identify the individual responsible for the failure.
Ask the manager to provide disciplinary actions.
A team is struggling with frequent context switching. As a servant leader, what is the best first step to foster an Agile mindset regarding focus?
Implement mandatory overtime to finish tasks.
Mandate daily status reports to the PMO.
Assign specific tasks to individuals without team input.
Introduce WIP limits at the team level.
WIP limits directly cap concurrent work, forcing the team to finish before starting and thereby reducing context switching. This addresses the stem's constraint — frequent task interleaving — by making focus a structural property of the workflow rather than relying on individual discipline, which aligns with servant-leadership enabling the team's Agile mindset.
A product owner wants to add a new requirement mid-sprint. According to Agile principles, what should the team do?
Accept the change and extend the sprint duration.
Refuse all changes immediately.
Ask the stakeholders to approve the change first.
Evaluate the change against the current sprint goal with the PO.
Agile protects the sprint goal rather than freezing scope, so the team and product owner jointly assess whether the new requirement supports that goal before accepting it. This satisfies the stem by evaluating the change collaboratively instead of rejecting or silently absorbing it.
A team member consistently criticizes ideas during retrospectives, creating a defensive atmosphere. How should the facilitator address this to improve psychological safety?
Publicly reprimand the team member during the next meeting.
Discuss the impact of the behavior privately with the individual.
A private conversation lets the facilitator raise the behaviour's impact on psychological safety without publicly shaming the critic, which would harden defensiveness. Addressing it one-to-one preserves the team's safe retrospective space while giving the individual a chance to adjust, directly satisfying the goal of improving psychological safety.
Ignore the behavior to avoid conflict.
Remove the team member from the project immediately.
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Practice this domainA product vision has become outdated due to market shifts. How should the Product Owner proceed?
Allow developers to decide the new vision.
Collaborate with stakeholders to revise the product vision.
Revising the vision with stakeholders directly addresses the market shift by revalidating value against current customer needs. This collaborative approach satisfies the Product Owner's accountability for maximising value, ensuring the updated vision reflects stakeholder input rather than one person's assumptions, and realigns the backlog and roadmap with the changed market.
Wait until the end of the project to change the vision.
Ignore the shift and continue with the original plan.
A user story lacks specific acceptance criteria. What is the risk to the development team?
The team will not know when the story meets requirements.
Without acceptance criteria, the team cannot verify completion, so the story's definition of done stays ambiguous. This directly satisfies the stem's constraint: absent testable conditions, developers cannot determine whether the increment meets the product owner's requirements, risking rework, scope creep and disputed sign-off during the iteration review.
The sprint will end earlier than expected.
The velocity will artificially increase.
The story will be too small to estimate.
Which document acts as the single source of truth for all work to be performed by the development team?
The sprint burndown chart.
The communication plan.
The project charter.
The product backlog.
The product backlog is the single source of truth for all work the development team performs, holding every feature, enhancement and fix in priority order. It satisfies the stem's requirement by centralising scope that the team pulls into sprints.
When writing user stories, which criteria ensure the story is ready for the development team to estimate?
The story must be at least 10 pages long.
The story must meet the Definition of Ready.
The Definition of Ready is the agreed checklist confirming a story is sufficiently refined, estimated and understood before sprint planning. Meeting it signals the team has enough detail to size the work, which is the criterion the question asks for.
The story must be approved by the CEO.
The story must be assigned to a specific developer.
A Product Owner notices that the product backlog has grown significantly, making it difficult to find relevant work items. Which action should the Product Owner take to improve visibility?
Group related user stories under larger epics.
Grouping related user stories under larger epics reduces backlog clutter by creating a hierarchical structure, so the Product Owner can navigate themes rather than scanning every item. This directly satisfies the stem's visibility constraint, since epics act as parent containers that collapse detailed stories, making relevant work items easier to locate as the backlog grows.
Archive the entire backlog and start a new one.
Increase the number of items per page in the tool.
Delete all old user stories to clear the clutter.
A project is mid-way, and stakeholders want to add a feature that was not in the original product roadmap. What is the appropriate response?
Evaluate the feature's value and impact on the backlog priority.
Agile teams handle unplanned requests by assessing the feature's business value and its effect on existing backlog priorities rather than automatically accepting or rejecting it. This lets the product owner reprioritise transparently, satisfying the stem's mid-project scope-change scenario.
Reject the request because it was not in the roadmap.
Immediately add the feature to the current sprint.
Refer the request to the project manager for approval.
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Practice this domainThe PMI-ACP exam has 120 questions and must be completed in 180 minutes. Always confirm current details on the vendor's official exam page.
Scenario-based project management questions covering agile, hybrid, and predictive delivery methodologies.
The exam covers 4 domains: Delivery, Leadership, Mindset, Product. Questions are weighted by domain — higher-weight domains appear more on your actual exam.
No. These are original exam-style practice questions written against the official PMI PMI-ACP exam objectives. They are not copied from the real exam. Courseiva focuses on genuine understanding, not memorisation of braindumps.
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