PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
Your agile team's velocity has dropped over the last three sprints. During the retrospective, the team cites increasing technical debt and lack of automated testing. Which TWO actions should you take to address this?
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
✓
Allocate time each sprint to address technical debt and improve code quality.
To improve velocity, the team should allocate time to reduce technical debt (e.g., refactoring) and implement automated testing to improve efficiency.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Allocate time each sprint to address technical debt and improve code quality.
Why this is correct
Technical debt, if left unaddressed, accumulates interest in the form of increased effort for future development, bug fixes, and maintenance, directly impeding team velocity. By proactively allocating dedicated time within each sprint for refactoring, improving code quality, and addressing known technical debt, the team reduces future impediments. This strategic investment prevents further degradation of the codebase and sustains a healthier, more predictable development pace, ultimately restoring and improving velocity.
- ✗
Reduce the definition of done to skip testing.
Why it's wrong here
Reducing the Definition of Done (DoD) to bypass essential testing activities is a detrimental short-term fix that severely compromises product quality and increases technical debt. Skipping testing allows defects to propagate into later stages or production, leading to costly rework, customer dissatisfaction, and a further decrease in velocity as the team spends more time on reactive bug fixing. A robust DoD, including thorough testing, is fundamental to sustainable agile development and maintaining a predictable velocity.
- ✗
Ask the team to work overtime to complete more story points.
Why it's wrong here
Mandating overtime to complete more story points is an unsustainable and counterproductive approach that often exacerbates existing problems. While it might offer a temporary bump in output, prolonged overtime leads to developer burnout, decreased morale, reduced focus, and an increase in errors and technical debt due to fatigue. This strategy fails to address the root causes of the velocity drop and ultimately diminishes long-term productivity and team health.
- ✗
Add more developers to the team to increase capacity.
Why it's wrong here
Adding more developers to an existing team experiencing a velocity drop, especially when technical debt is a likely factor, often invokes Brooks' Law, which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." New team members require significant onboarding, diverting existing team members' time and increasing communication overhead. This approach fails to address the underlying issues causing the velocity drop, such as technical debt or process inefficiencies, and can further decrease overall team productivity in the short term.
- ✓
Implement automated testing to catch defects early and reduce rework.
Why this is correct
Implementing automated testing is a highly effective strategy to improve code quality, reduce technical debt, and stabilize velocity. Automated tests provide rapid feedback on code changes, catching defects early in the development cycle before they become more expensive to fix. This significantly reduces manual testing effort, minimizes rework, and builds developer confidence in making changes, thereby accelerating the development process and ensuring a more consistent and higher quality output.
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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.