PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
In an agile project, the team's velocity has decreased over the last three sprints from 30 story points to 22. During the retrospective, the team cites increasing technical debt as the cause. What should the scrum master do FIRST?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse 'escalating' (Option C) with 'facilitating' (Option A), mistakenly thinking that management must be informed first, when in agile the team is empowered to solve its own process issues through the retrospective.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Facilitate a discussion with the team to identify actions to reduce technical debt and improve velocity.
The Scrum Master's primary role is to facilitate the team's self-improvement. When technical debt is identified as the root cause of velocity decline, the first action is to guide the team in a retrospective discussion to analyze the debt, prioritize refactoring, and agree on concrete actions (e.g., dedicating sprint capacity to debt reduction, implementing coding standards, or using static analysis tools). This aligns with the agile principle of continuous improvement and directly addresses the cause rather than just the symptom.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Facilitate a discussion with the team to identify actions to reduce technical debt and improve velocity.
Why this is correct
The Scrum Master's primary role is to serve the team and remove impediments. Facilitating a discussion empowers the self-organizing team to collaboratively identify the root causes of decreased velocity, such as technical debt, and devise actionable strategies to address them. This approach leverages the team's collective expertise to find sustainable solutions, fostering continuous improvement and directly aligning with agile principles of self-management and problem-solving within the team.
- ✗
Ask the product owner to reduce the sprint backlog to match the lower velocity.
Why it's wrong here
Asking the Product Owner to reduce the sprint backlog merely accommodates the symptom of decreased velocity without addressing its underlying cause, which is technical debt. While adjusting scope might be a temporary measure, it fails to resolve the fundamental issues impacting the team's productivity and code quality. The Scrum Master's responsibility is to help the team overcome impediments, not simply to lower expectations or shift the burden of an unaddressed problem.
- ✗
Report the velocity drop to management and escalate the technical debt issue.
Why it's wrong here
Escalating the velocity drop and technical debt issue to management is premature and bypasses the Scrum Master's responsibility to first work with the team. The Scrum Master should empower the self-organizing team to identify and resolve impediments internally before seeking external intervention. Escalation is typically reserved for situations where the team is truly blocked and requires resources or decisions beyond their control, which is not indicated as the initial step here.
- ✗
Add more developers to the team to increase velocity.
Why it's wrong here
Adding more developers to a team experiencing decreased velocity due to technical debt is generally counterproductive, often exacerbating the problem as described by Brooks' Law. New team members require onboarding and increase communication overhead, initially reducing overall productivity. Furthermore, this action fails to address the core issue of technical debt, which is a quality and maintainability problem, not a simple resource shortage, and new members would inherit the existing technical burden.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PMP practice question is part of Courseiva's free PMI certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PMP exam.