Practice questions · Project Management
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP): Practice Questions
Around 81 original concept-check questions for the PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner) across the four 2024-outline domains: Mindset, Leadership, Product and Delivery. They span the Agile Manifesto and principles, Lean thinking, and framework practices from Scrum, Kanban and XP, with every answer explained, including why the others are wrong. Filter by domain or difficulty. These are concept checks, not real exam questions.
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The PMI-ACP is best described as:
Correct answer: B. The PMI-ACP spans Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP and more. It is not Scrum-only, waterfall or a coding exam. -
A core idea of the agile mindset is to:
Correct answer: B. The agile mindset welcomes change and adapts based on feedback. Fixing all scope up front, planning everything before starting, and avoiding customers are predictive, plan-driven behaviours agile deliberately moves away from. -
'Inspect and adapt' in agile means the team should:
Correct answer: D. 'Inspect and adapt' means reviewing progress regularly (for example in retrospectives) and adjusting. Inspecting only at the end, adapting without reviewing, or never changing the process all break this feedback loop. -
Empirical process control is based on:
Correct answer: C. Empirical process control rests on three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation. Command-and-control, avoiding measurement, and relying only on detailed up-front plans are the predictive opposite of empiricism. -
On the PMI-ACP, the two most heavily weighted domains are:
Correct answer: C. Mindset and Delivery are 28% each - the largest. Leadership is 25% and Product 19%. -
Adapting your approach to context (rather than forcing one method) reflects:
Correct answer: C. Choosing the approach that fits the context is core agile thinking, not a failure. It is the opposite of a rigid predictive plan, and adapting deliberately follows agile principles rather than ignoring them. -
Psychological safety on an agile team primarily enables:
Correct answer: A. Psychological safety lets people raise problems and ideas without fear, surfacing issues early. Hiding impediments, avoiding feedback, or skipping process are the very behaviours safety is meant to prevent. -
Servant leadership means the leader's role is to:
Correct answer: A. A servant leader enables and supports the team, removing blockers and coaching. Commanding and assigning every task is command-and-control, while taking the credit or avoiding the team is the opposite of servant leadership. -
A scrum master who notices an external blocker should first:
Correct answer: A. Removing impediments for the team is central to the scrum master role. Ignoring the blocker or blaming the team leaves it unsolved, and cancelling the sprint is a drastic, unwarranted response to one external blocker. -
Facilitation by an agile leader means:
Correct answer: A. Facilitation helps the team hold effective conversations and reach decisions together. Making every decision alone or preventing discussion removes the team's involvement, and reporting the team to management is not facilitation at all. -
Coaching a team toward self-organisation means:
Correct answer: B. Coaching toward self-organisation builds the team's capability to manage its own work. Micromanaging, assigning tasks top-down, or removing autonomy all do the reverse - they keep the team dependent. -
Effective stakeholder collaboration in agile relies on:
Correct answer: D. Agile relies on frequent, transparent communication and feedback with stakeholders. Avoiding them, hiding progress, or giving a single report at the end removes the regular feedback agile depends on. -
When team members disagree, a servant leader best:
Correct answer: C. A servant leader facilitates a constructive resolution so the team grows from it. Forcing a side or immediately escalating bypasses the team, and ignoring the conflict lets it fester. -
Leading by 'pull' rather than 'push' means:
Correct answer: B. A pull system lets the team take new work as capacity frees up, which protects flow. Pushing or assigning all work at once overloads the team, and ignoring WIP removes the very limit that makes pull work. -
Value-driven delivery means:
Correct answer: A. Value-driven delivery means doing the highest-value work first so benefit arrives early. Random order or no prioritisation ignores value, and delivering everything only at the end delays all of it. -
The product backlog is:
Correct answer: B. The product backlog is an ordered, evolving list of what might be needed in the product. It is not a fixed contract (it changes constantly), not a team schedule, and not a record of only finished work. -
Who is accountable for ordering the product backlog?
Correct answer: B. The product owner is accountable for ordering the backlog to maximise value. It is not the compliance team, not the whole company collectively, and certainly not nobody - single accountability is the point. -
A minimum viable product (MVP) is:
Correct answer: D. An MVP is the smallest version that delivers value and validates learning early. It is not the final, full-featured product (the opposite), nor merely a document or a test environment. -
Prioritising the backlog by value and risk helps the team:
Correct answer: D. Prioritising by value and risk means tackling the most important and risky items early, reducing uncertainty sooner. Leaving risky items to the end keeps that risk hanging, and ignoring stakeholders or not delivering defeats the purpose. -
A user story is best described as:
Correct answer: B. A user story is a short, plain-language description of a feature from the user's perspective. It is deliberately not a detailed legal contract, a test script, or a budget line. -
A product owner who keeps the backlog ordered by value primarily helps the team to:
Correct answer: C. An ordered backlog means the team always pulls the most valuable item next. Working in random order undoes that, while skipping stakeholder input or not delivering increments contradicts how the order is set and used. -
Iterative delivery means the team:
Correct answer: C. Iterative delivery produces working increments repeatedly over short cycles, gathering feedback each time. Delivering only once at the end, never delivering working software, or delivering without feedback are all non-iterative. -
In Kanban, a work-in-progress (WIP) limit is used to:
Correct answer: D. A WIP limit caps how many items can be in a stage, which improves flow and exposes bottlenecks. It reduces multitasking rather than increasing it, does not hide bottlenecks (it reveals them), and is unrelated to removing the board. -
Velocity is most useful for:
Correct answer: C. Velocity is used to forecast how much work a team can take on in future iterations. It is not a measure of code quality, and using it to judge individuals or set pay misuses a team planning metric. -
A retrospective is held to:
Correct answer: C. A retrospective is where the team reflects on its process and identifies improvements. It is not for planning the roadmap, reporting to auditors, or assigning blame - it is a blame-free improvement meeting. -
A 'Definition of Done' is:
Correct answer: B. The Definition of Done is a shared, agreed checklist of what must be true for work to count as complete. It is not a personal preference (it is team-wide and consistent), and it is neither a budget nor a marketing plan. -
A burndown chart shows:
Correct answer: B. A burndown chart shows remaining work over time within an iteration or release, so the team can see progress toward completion. It has nothing to do with salaries, office layout, or customer addresses. -
Limiting work in progress generally improves delivery because:
Correct answer: D. Limiting work in progress improves focus and flow because fewer items are open at once and finish sooner. More multitasking is not faster (it adds context-switching), and limiting WIP exposes problems rather than hiding them or replacing planning. -
Continuous improvement in delivery is supported by:
Correct answer: C. Continuous improvement uses metrics and retrospectives to keep adapting the process. Never measuring or avoiding feedback removes the inputs for improvement, and 'fixing' the process permanently rejects the idea of continual change. -
Choosing Kanban over Scrum for a support team with continuous, unplanned work reflects:
Correct answer: A. Choosing Kanban for continuous, unplanned support work matches the framework to the context - exactly what the framework-agnostic PMI-ACP encourages. It is not a rejection or misunderstanding of agile, nor a predictive plan. -
The Agile Manifesto values 'individuals and interactions over':
Correct answer: A. The first value places individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software, customer collaboration and responding to change are the left-hand sides of the other three value statements, not what is valued less here. -
The Agile Manifesto values 'customer collaboration over':
Correct answer: C. The third value places customer collaboration over contract negotiation. The other options are the preferred sides of different value statements, not the lower side of this one. -
An agile principle states the highest priority is to satisfy the customer through:
Correct answer: B. The first agile principle is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Up-front contracts, a single late release, and avoiding the customer are contrary to it. -
Agile principles say that working software (or a working product) is the primary measure of:
Correct answer: D. An agile principle states that working software is the primary measure of progress. Cost, team size and documentation volume are not how agile primarily measures progress. -
The agile principle about change states that teams should:
Correct answer: A. Agile welcomes changing requirements, even late in development, harnessing change for the customer's competitive advantage. Freezing requirements, permanently rejecting change, or penalizing it run against the principle. -
In Lean thinking, 'waste' (muda) refers to:
Correct answer: C. Lean defines waste as any activity that consumes resources without adding value for the customer, such as waiting, handoffs or partially done work. It is not limited to physical scrap, overtime, or documentation in general. -
A core Lean concept is to optimize the whole, which warns against:
Correct answer: B. Optimizing the whole warns against improving one local step in a way that harms the end-to-end flow and overall value. Delivering value, engaging customers and limiting WIP are consistent with Lean, not the thing it warns against. -
The agile principle on pace recommends:
Correct answer: D. Agile promotes sustainable development: the team should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Maximum overtime, working only under audit, or ignoring rest undermine sustainability. -
'Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done,' is an agile principle that encourages teams to:
Correct answer: A. This principle encourages avoiding unnecessary work and focusing on what truly delivers value. Doing every feature, skipping testing, or piling on process all contradict simplicity. -
An agile team that holds a regular retrospective to tune its behavior is following the principle that the team should:
Correct answer: C. The principle states that at regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Keeping the way of working fixed, waiting for management, or improving only yearly are contrary. -
Building projects around motivated individuals and trusting them to get the job done reflects an agile principle about:
Correct answer: B. The principle says to build projects around motivated individuals, giving them the environment and support they need and trusting them to get the job done. Command-and-control, removing autonomy and micromanagement oppose it. -
An agile mindset treats failure of an experiment as:
Correct answer: D. An agile, empirical mindset treats a failed experiment as learning that informs the next decision, encouraging safe-to-fail experiments. Punishing, hiding, or concluding agile failed all discourage the learning loop. -
Choosing the most face-to-face-like communication available for a distributed team reflects the agile principle that the most effective method of conveying information is:
Correct answer: A. An agile principle states the most efficient and effective method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation, which distributed teams approximate with video. Lengthy specs, one-way reports and email-only are less effective. -
An agile coach using a 'teaching' stance would:
Correct answer: C. In a teaching stance, the coach shares knowledge and explains practices the team has not yet learned. Withholding knowledge, deciding for the team, or avoiding them are not teaching. -
A servant leader measures their success largely by:
Correct answer: B. Servant leadership judges success by how the team grows, becomes more autonomous and performs. Personal task output, fear, or report counts are not the measure. -
When facilitating a decision, an agile leader who senses false consensus should:
Correct answer: D. A facilitator can use techniques such as fist-of-five voting to surface genuine agreement or hidden concerns before committing. Rushing past objections, deciding alone, or cancelling the discussion ignores the real consensus. -
An agile leader builds trust with stakeholders mainly by:
Correct answer: A. Transparency and frequent demonstration of working increments build stakeholder trust. Hiding bad news, over-promising fixed constraints, or limiting communication erode it. -
A coaching (as opposed to teaching) stance is most appropriate when the team:
Correct answer: C. Coaching suits a team that has the knowledge but needs help reflecting and discovering its own answers, building capability. Teaching fits a knowledge gap, and doing the work or refusing to communicate are not coaching situations. -
A servant leader 'shields the team' primarily to:
Correct answer: B. Shielding protects the team from disruptions and unreasonable outside demands so they can focus on the Sprint or flow. It does not mean hiding their work, blocking customer contact, or dodging accountability. -
Leading change in an organization adopting agile, a leader is most effective when they:
Correct answer: D. Effective agile change leaders model the behaviors and build buy-in through small, visible wins. Mandating everything at once, hiding the rationale, or punishing struggling teams tends to create resistance. -
When two stakeholders give the team conflicting priorities, the servant leader should first:
Correct answer: A. The leader facilitates the stakeholders, usually through the product owner, to resolve conflicting priorities into a single ordered backlog. Letting the team guess, choosing secretly, or halting work indefinitely are poor responses. -
An agile leader fosters a 'learning organization' by:
Correct answer: C. A learning organization is fostered by encouraging experimentation, sharing knowledge and reflecting on outcomes. Discouraging questions, centralizing decisions, or hiding failures block organizational learning. -
Servant leadership and 'command-and-control' differ mainly in that servant leadership:
Correct answer: B. Servant leadership focuses on enabling and developing people, whereas command-and-control directs every action. It does not micromanage, strip the team of responsibility, or abdicate leadership. -
A facilitator opening a workshop sets a clear 'working agreement' to:
Correct answer: D. A working agreement sets shared norms so the session runs effectively and everyone can contribute. It is not about restricting participation to managers, predetermining the decision, or removing structure. -
To encourage a quiet team member's input during planning, an inclusive facilitator might:
Correct answer: A. Techniques such as silent writing or round-robin let quieter members contribute and balance participation. Ignoring them, deferring to the loudest, or skipping their input loses valuable perspective. -
In Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), priority is calculated as cost of delay divided by:
Correct answer: C. WSJF prioritizes by dividing the cost of delay by the job duration or size, so short, high-value items rank first. Team size, stakeholder count and story count are not part of the WSJF calculation. -
In MoSCoW prioritization, the 'M' stands for:
Correct answer: B. In MoSCoW, 'M' is 'Must have', the requirements without which the release fails. 'Maybe', 'most expensive' and 'minor' are not the categories; the others are Should have, Could have and Won't have this time. -
The Kano model helps a product owner classify features by:
Correct answer: D. The Kano model classifies features by their effect on customer satisfaction, such as basic (must-be), performance and delighter (excitement) needs. File size, developer preference and alphabetical order are irrelevant to it. -
A persona in product work is:
Correct answer: A. A persona is a fictional, research-based archetype that represents a user segment to guide product decisions. It is not a specific contracting customer, a job title, or a test case. -
'Cost of delay' expresses:
Correct answer: C. Cost of delay quantifies the economic impact of not delivering a feature or outcome sooner, helping prioritize by value over time. It is not team salary, server price, or defect count. -
A product roadmap in agile is best treated as:
Correct answer: B. An agile roadmap is a flexible, outcome-oriented plan that adapts as learning occurs, rather than a locked contract of dates. It is not a record of finished work or a holiday calendar. -
Acceptance criteria on a user story primarily serve to:
Correct answer: D. Acceptance criteria define the specific conditions a story must meet to be accepted, making 'done' shared and testable. They do not set pay, order the whole backlog, or replace the vision. -
The INVEST guideline for a good user story includes that a story should be:
Correct answer: A. INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable. The other expansions are invented and do not describe a well-formed user story. -
Splitting a large epic into smaller stories mainly helps the team to:
Correct answer: C. Splitting an epic into smaller stories lets the team deliver value incrementally and gather feedback sooner. It is not meant to avoid value, raise WIP, or conceal scope. -
A product owner deciding what NOT to build is exercising:
Correct answer: B. Choosing what not to build is part of value-based prioritization, protecting capacity for higher-value work. It is not poor planning, a technical role, or configuration management. -
In Kanban, 'lead time' typically measures the time from when:
Correct answer: D. Lead time measures from when a work item is requested (enters the system) until it is delivered. It is not a coding-to-lunch span, the Sprint boundary, or a contract cycle. -
'Cycle time' in flow metrics generally measures the time from when work:
Correct answer: A. Cycle time measures from when work actively starts until it is completed, a subset of lead time. It is not measured to first contact, or by deletion or archiving. -
Little's Law relates average work in progress, throughput and:
Correct answer: C. Little's Law states that average WIP equals throughput multiplied by average cycle time, so reducing WIP can shorten cycle time. Salary, stakeholder count and story points are not part of the law. -
A cumulative flow diagram (CFD) helps a team spot:
Correct answer: B. A cumulative flow diagram shows work across stages over time, revealing bottlenecks and growing WIP as bands widen. It does not show seating, salaries, or budgets. -
In Extreme Programming (XP), test-driven development (TDD) means writing:
Correct answer: D. TDD writes a failing test first, then just enough code to pass it, then refactors, in short red-green-refactor cycles. Testing only after shipping, not testing, or only manual scripts are not TDD. -
Continuous integration (CI) in XP is the practice of:
Correct answer: A. Continuous integration means integrating and testing code frequently, often many times a day, to catch problems early. Integrating only at the end, avoiding version control, or deploying untested code are the opposite. -
Refactoring is best described as:
Correct answer: C. Refactoring improves the internal structure of code without changing its external behavior, keeping it maintainable. It is not adding features, removing tests, or rewriting requirements. -
Throughput as a flow metric measures:
Correct answer: B. Throughput measures how many work items the team completes per unit of time, indicating delivery rate. It is not tenure, building cost, or meeting count. -
Affinity estimation is a technique where the team:
Correct answer: D. Affinity estimation rapidly groups many backlog items by relative size, often physically on a wall, to size a large backlog quickly. It is not exact-hour solo estimation, skipping estimation, or single-person estimation. -
A 'spike' in agile delivery is used to:
Correct answer: A. A spike is a time-boxed investigation or prototype that reduces technical or functional uncertainty before committing. It is not a punishment, a way to raise WIP, or a cancellation. -
Pair programming improves delivery primarily by:
Correct answer: D. Pair programming gives continuous, real-time review and spreads knowledge across the team as two developers collaborate. It does not double documentation, remove tests, or slow learning. -
A team that limits work in progress and finishes items before starting new ones is improving its:
Correct answer: A. Limiting WIP and finishing before starting improves flow and predictability by reducing context switching and getting items done sooner. It has nothing to do with decor, salary, or marketing. -
'Escaped defects' is a quality metric counting defects that:
Correct answer: D. Escaped defects are those that reached the customer or production after release, indicating gaps in quality practices. Defects caught before release, unrecorded ones, or duplicates are not what the metric tracks. -
A team's velocity is best used to:
Correct answer: A. Velocity helps a team forecast its own future capacity and plan, but is context-specific. Comparing teams, setting bonuses, or judging code quality misuse the metric. -
Swarming on a single high-priority item means the team:
Correct answer: D. Swarming focuses several team members on completing one high-priority item quickly, improving flow. It is the opposite of spreading thin, and it does not stop collaboration or ignore priorities. -
Frequent delivery of small increments reduces risk mainly because it:
Correct answer: A. Small, frequent increments shorten the feedback loop so the team can course-correct sooner, lowering risk. Delaying feedback, increasing batch size, or hiding progress would raise risk.
Practice questions FAQ
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