PMI-ACP Delivery Practice Test 2 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A project is experiencing significant scope creep. How should the practitioner handle this to protect the team's delivery capacity?

Accepted Answer

Ask the Product Owner to evaluate and prioritize requests against the current sprint goal.. In agile/Scrum, the Product Owner is the single point of accountability for backlog prioritization and scope decisions. When scope creep threatens the sprint, the correct response is to route new requests through the Product Owner so they can be evaluated against the sprint goal and either deferred, split, or swapped for existing work. This protects the team's sustainable pace and preserves the sprint commitment without the team unilaterally absorbing extra work.

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Add more hours to the work week for the team.

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Delete the backlog to force a restart.

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Accept all new requests to please stakeholders.

Question 2

A team's cycle time has significantly increased over three sprints. What is the most appropriate first step to identify the root cause?

Accepted Answer

Discuss the trend during the next team retrospective.. When cycle time trends upward over multiple sprints, the team needs a structured forum to inspect the data and surface root causes — the retrospective is exactly that venue. Discussing the trend there lets the team analyze the data collaboratively, identify systemic issues, and agree on experiments to improve flow. This aligns with agile's inspect-and-adapt principle and keeps ownership with the team.

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Increase the WIP limit.

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Fire the team lead.

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Ignore it as minor fluctuations.

Question 3

What is the primary purpose of a sprint review?

Accepted Answer

To inspect the product and adapt the backlog based on stakeholder feedback.. The sprint review is an empirical inspection-and-adaptation event held at the end of the sprint where the Scrum Team and stakeholders examine the Increment and collaborate on what to do next. Its core output is an adapted Product Backlog informed by stakeholder feedback and changing market conditions. It is not a status report or a planning session — it is a working session to validate the product direction.

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To discuss team conflicts.

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To calculate velocity.

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To plan the next sprint.

Question 4

What does a 'Definition of Done' ensure in an agile delivery?

Accepted Answer

A common understanding of quality and readiness criteria for increments.. The Definition of Done (DoD) is a shared, explicit checklist that describes the quality attributes and completion criteria every increment must satisfy before it can be considered 'done.' It creates a common understanding across the team, PO, and stakeholders of what 'done' actually means, preventing the ambiguity that leads to hidden technical debt and rework.

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That the project budget is not exceeded.

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That the team is working the required number of hours.

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That all requirements have been met regardless of effort.

Question 5

Which visual tool is best suited for identifying bottlenecks in a team's workflow?

Accepted Answer

Kanban board.. A Kanban board is the visual management tool specifically designed to expose workflow states and surface bottlenecks. By displaying work items as cards moving through columns representing process stages, it makes accumulation of work-in-progress (WIP) at any stage immediately visible. When cards pile up in one column, that column is the bottleneck, enabling the team to apply WIP limits or swarm to resolve it.

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Budget report.

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Gantt chart.

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Pie chart of tasks.

Question 6

A stakeholder requests a feature mid-sprint that is vital to organizational success. How should the practitioner respond?

Accepted Answer

Direct the stakeholder to the Product Owner to discuss the trade-offs and impact.. The Product Owner is responsible for managing the product backlog and prioritizing work. When a stakeholder requests a mid-sprint change, the practitioner should direct them to the Product Owner to discuss trade-offs and impact, as the Product Owner decides whether to adjust the sprint backlog or defer the request.

Answer

Deny the request immediately.

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Add it to the sprint immediately without removing anything.

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Ask the developers to work faster.

Question 7

During a multi-team project, teams are frequently blocked by infrastructure delays. What is the most effective way to address this at the organizational level?

Accepted Answer

Establish a dedicated 'Enabler' team or service-level agreement for infrastructure support.. When multiple teams are repeatedly blocked by infrastructure delays, the most effective organizational response is to create a dedicated enabler team or establish a service-level agreement (SLA) for infrastructure support. This removes the systemic bottleneck and allows delivery teams to focus on value-adding work, which is a core Agile scaling principle.

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Escalate to the CEO.

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Ask each team to build their own infrastructure.

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Stop all infrastructure improvements.

Question 8

A team is struggling with meeting their sprint goals. What is the best strategy to improve delivery reliability?

Accepted Answer

Focus on improving estimation accuracy and managing capacity effectively.. Sprint goal reliability improves when the team's forecasts match its actual capacity. Focusing on estimation accuracy (e.g., through story point calibration, reference stories, and historical data) and actively managing capacity (accounting for leave, ceremonies, and support work) directly addresses the root causes of missed goals. This is the empirical, sustainable path.

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Increase velocity targets arbitrarily.

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Force the team to work weekends.

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Decrease the quality standards.

Question 9

A team member is consistently finishing their tasks early but other members are struggling. How should the team respond to optimize flow?

Accepted Answer

Encourage the team member to assist others with their tasks.. In Agile, the team's goal is to optimize flow and deliver value collectively, not to maximize individual utilization. When one member finishes early, the most Agile-aligned response is to have them swarm on other tasks or pair with struggling teammates, which balances WIP and reduces bottlenecks. This supports the self-organizing, cross-functional team principle and avoids creating a new bottleneck by overloading one person.

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Assign them more tasks than anyone else.

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Ignore the imbalance.

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Ask them to start working on next sprint's items.

Question 10

The organization wants to move from monthly releases to continuous delivery. What is the most important technical requirement for this transition?

Accepted Answer

Implement automated build and testing pipelines.. Continuous delivery requires that every code change can be automatically built, tested, and deployed to production-like environments with confidence. Automated build and testing pipelines (CI/CD) are the foundational technical enabler — without them, frequent releases introduce unacceptable risk and manual error. This is the core technical prerequisite for moving from monthly to continuous delivery.

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Hire more developers.

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Lower the security standards.

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Stop all documentation.

Question 11

A product manager wants to add a new feature that will delay the release by two weeks. What is the best way to handle this?

Accepted Answer

Present the trade-off to the stakeholders to decide if the new feature is worth the delay.. When a new feature would delay a release, the agile-correct approach is to make the trade-off transparent and let the stakeholders decide whether the feature's value justifies the delay. The product manager's role is to surface the cost and benefit, not to unilaterally decide or hide the impact. This preserves stakeholder ownership of scope and schedule decisions.

Answer

Work overtime to meet the original date.

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Implement it immediately.

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Secretly add it and work late.

Question 12

Which of the following is a key component of a good user story?

Accepted Answer

INVEST criteria.. INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) are key components of a good user story. They ensure that user stories are well-defined, deliver value, and are suitable for iterative development.

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A fixed deadline.

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A 20-page document.

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Detailed technical specifications.

Question 13

When should a team perform risk management in an agile project?

Accepted Answer

Continuously throughout the project.. In agile projects, risk management is a continuous activity performed throughout the project lifecycle, not a one-time event. Agile teams inspect and adapt regularly, identifying and addressing risks in every iteration through ceremonies like daily standups, retrospectives, and sprint reviews. This continuous approach aligns with agile's empirical nature.

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It is the responsibility of the project sponsor only.

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Only when a crisis occurs.

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Only at the start of the project.

Question 14

An enterprise organization is struggling to coordinate agile delivery across global time zones. What is the most effective approach?

Accepted Answer

Schedule core overlapping hours for synchronization and use asynchronous communication tools.. In globally distributed agile teams, the most effective coordination strategy is to establish a shared window of overlapping working hours for synchronous ceremonies (daily standups, sprint planning, retrospectives) while relying on asynchronous tools (wikis, boards, recorded demos, chat threads) for the rest of the work. This preserves real-time collaboration where it adds the most value without forcing unsustainable schedules on any single region. It aligns with PMI-ACP principles of adaptive communication planning and team empowerment.

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Stop all collaboration.

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Only work with teams in the same time zone.

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Force all teams to work the same hours.

Question 15

A team is struggling with high levels of 'technical debt' that slow down new feature delivery. What should the team do?

Accepted Answer

Allocate a percentage of each sprint's capacity to address technical debt.. Allocating a percentage of each sprint's capacity to technical debt (D) is the balanced agile approach: it continuously reduces debt while still delivering new features. This prevents the debt from compounding and slowing delivery further.

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Request a new budget to hire external experts.

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Stop all new feature work for a year to fix everything.

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Ignore the debt and continue adding features.