Question of PMI ACP exam

1. Continuous Improvement
1. Process tailoring would be a good option for:
A. A new team that has been formed by the merger of
two other agile teams
B. A team that is struggling to get their agile methods to
work smoothly
C. A team that is using agile successfully but would like
to improve their methods
D. A team that wants to start using agile methods
2. A series of project pre-mortems would be most useful
on:
A. A long-term, risky project
B. A short project with a hard deadline
C. A proposed project with well-defined technology and
requirements
D. A project that will require process tailoring
3. You hear that another team is using an agile-
traditional hybrid approach. What is this most likely to
involve?
A. They are using agile methods to plan the project and
traditional methods to track and measure performance.
B. They are using agile methods for project accounting
and traditional methods for the other elements of the
project
C. They are using traditional methods to estimate the
work and agile methods to plan the work.
D. They are using agile methods to build the product
and traditional methods for the procurement workflow.
4. In a retrospective, what technique could your team
use to ensure that you really understand a problem
you've identified?
A. Five Whys
B. Dot voting
C. Kano analysis
D. MoSCoW
5. If your total cycle time has remained the same but
your value-added time has gone up, what does this
mean?
A. Your nonvalue-added time has increased.
B. Your value-added time now equals your nonvalue-
added time.
C. The efficiency of your process has decreased.
D. The efficiency of your process has improved.
6. The best way to improve the efficiency of a process is
to:
A. Do more detailed planning.
B. Remove waste and bottlenecks.
C. Minimize common cause variation.
D. Add more stringent process controls.
7. Your team spends 10 minutes waiting for people to
turn up for the daily stand-up meeting, which then lasts
15 minutes. The stand-up meeting is then followed by
another 5 minutes of the team discussing the hockey
game last night, and yet another 5 minutes
brainstorming issues to solve. Calculate the total cycle
time of this process, assuming that the hockey
discussion is not categorized as a value-added activity.
A. 15 minutes
B. 20 minutes
C. 30 minutes
D. 35 minutes

2. 8. When generating insights in a retrospective, we ask
“why” five times to:
A. Move beyond our automatic, habitual answers and
get to the root cause of an issue.
B. Get past the denial and resistance that tend to occur
in the first three or four answers.
C. Gather five levels of data around the issue.
D. Avoid asking “why” six times, since that would be
overkill.
9. Which of the following is a form of agile review?
A. Sprints
B. Customer demos
C. Unit testing
D. Project pre-mortems
10. In agile, the kaizen approach involves:
A. Continuous, incremental improvements
recommended by process experts
B. Bold, top-down re-engineering initiatives
C. Small, incremental improvements by the people who
are doing the work
D. Stopping the process as needed to implement
essential improvements
11. You have been asked to review an agile team’s
recently enhanced methodology to assess its
effectiveness. The desirable characteristics that you
should be looking for include:
A. A preference for rapid communications, significant
process weight, recommendations for larger teams to
use fighter methods
B. A preference for digital communications, not too
much process weight, recommendations for larger
teams to use simpler methods
C. A preference for relevant communications, significant
process weight, recommendations for larger teams to
use heavier methods
D. A preference for face-to-face communications, not
too much process weight, recommendations for larger
teams to use heavier methods
12. Continuous improvement is a core benefit of which
agile practices?
A. Pair programming, daily stand-up meetings, WIP
limits
B. User stories, daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives
C. Pair programming, daily stand-up meetings,
retrospectives
D. Story points, pair programming, WIP limits
13. Which of the following is not one of the questions
that we are continually asking in a product feedback
loop?
A. Does it meet the customer needs and expectations?
B. Does it work in all conditions?
C. Did we break anything while building this?
D. Did the project get shipped?
14. The primary reason for doing a project pre-mortem
is to:
A. Gather lessons learned from an iteration.
B. Summarize the lessons learned at the end of a
project.
C. Identify potential risks so that we can mitigate them.
D. Accurately forecast the results of the project.

3. 15. On the chart used in the Timeline exercise for
gathering data in a retrospective, a horizontal line can
be added below the x-axis to represent:
A. Team velocity overtime
B. Team emotional responses over time
C. Team risk rankings average
D. Team hours of work per week
16. Process tailoring is best undertake non agile projects
when:
A. There are difficulties in implementing agile practices.
B. Experienced practitioners want to address an issue.
C. The team needs new processes to keep them
engaged.
D. A boost in team velocity is needed to meet the
schedule.
17. Which of the following benefits would your agile
team most likely gain from performing a self-
assessment?
A. Improve the team’s practices.
B. Gain insights for individual performance reviews.
C. Identify personal traits for human resources
counseling.
D. Determine compatibilities for pair programming
assignments.
18. When should agile teams collect lessons learned?
A. At the end of the project
B. Throughout the project
C. When projects go well
D. When projects go poorly
19. Your sponsor is asking about tailoring the company’s
newly adopted agile methodology. Your advice should
be:
A. Tailoring it will be a good way to learn more about
the methodology.
B. Tailoring it will be a good way to ease into the initial
adoption process.
C. We should tailor it first, then consider adopting it.
D. We should try it first, then consider tailoring it.
20. Teams gain the most benefits from using an agile
approach in:
A. Projects that are as uncertain as possible
B. Projects with high levels of technological uncertainty
and low levels of complexity in requirements
C. Projects with medium levels of complexity in both
technology and requirements
D. Projects with low levels of uncertainty in
requirements and technology
21. After working through two iterations with your Agile
team, you’ve noticed that velocity is a bit lower than
anticipated. During a daily stand-up meeting, one of the
impediments that your team identifies is that the
process seems bulky and more time-consuming than it
needs to be. What would you suggest as a good way for
the team to analyze the team processes for areas of
improvement?
A. Wireframe
B. Burn down chart
C. Value stream map
D. Replanning session

4. 22. As an Agile project management expert, you know
that the difference between lead time and cycle time is
which one of the following?
A. Lead time is the total amount of time that the
process takes, and cycle time is the total amount of
time that an iteration takes.
B. Lead time is the total amount of time that the
iteration takes, and cycle time is the total amount of
time that the process takes.
C. Lead time is the total amount of time that you get
when fast-tracking your schedule, and cycle time is the
total amount of time that an iteration takes.
D. Lead time is the total amount of time that the
process takes, and cycle time is the total amount of
time that refactoring takes.
23. Your team is working on a visual representation of
their current process to determine if there is a better
way to perform the process. With which of the
following visual items are they working?
A. Value analysis
B. Value maps
C. Story maps
D. Value stream maps
24. You are working on a Lean project. You have
determined that you spend 50 minutes putting together
a presentation that will last 20 minutes. What is the
current calculated process cycle efficiency?
A. 70 minutes
B. 30 percent
C. 50 minutes
D. 28 percent
25. Your Agile team is in a scheduled timeboxed
meeting and is asking questions like, “What should our
product do?” “How could it fail?” “Why would it fail?” In
what kind of meeting is your team participating?
A. Retrospective
B. Review
C. Premortems
D. Sprint planning
26. Which of the following is the best way to answer the
following questions? What should we stop doing? Start
doing? Keep doing?
A. Introspective
B. Reviews
C. Iteration reviews
D. Retrospectives
27. During the retrospective of your current sprint, your
team seems to be all over the map in how they think
things went. What is something that you can
recommend to get to the bottom of the emotional
reactions of the team?
A. Brainstorming
B. The 5 whys
C. Mad, sad, glad
D. Pair programming
28. What is the goal of a retrospective regardless of the
techniques used?
A. The goal of a retrospective is reflection.
B. The goal of a retrospective is solutions.
C. The goal of a retrospective is venting.
D. The goal of a retrospective is formal closure of an
iteration.

5. 29. During your retrospective, what is the most
important thing that you as a coach can do to help your
team reflect on the iteration?
A. The team is encouraged to express their negatives as
well as their positives of the iteration if it is well
facilitated.
B. The team is encouraged to express their negatives
but not their positives.
C. If the retrospective is well facilitated, the team is
encouraged to express the positives
of the project only.
D. The team is encouraged to learn from their mistakes
and follow the lessons learned next time around.
30. Which of the following hybrid models of Agile is
most common?
A. Scrum and ASD
B. XP and Crystal
C. Scrum and Lean
D. Scrum and XP
31. Your team is meeting during the early stages of the
iteration to discuss some of the items that may go
wrong in the iteration. Which of the following meetings
are you conducting? A. Retrospective meeting
B. Premortem meeting
C. Kickoff meeting
D. Sprint planning meeting
32. The Project Management Institute collaborated with
which of the following organizations when developing
its Agile Practice Guide?
A. The Scrum Alliance
B. The Agile Alliance
C. The eXtreme Programming Alliance
D. Project managers globally
33. Which of the following diagram types can show
areas where issues have occurred, or may occur, and
allow the team to adapt and adjust as needed?
A. Cumulative diagram
B. Kanban diagram
C. Burn down diagram
D. Cumulative flow diagram
34. Which of the following is the German term for pace
or rhythm, and it is also used to help track performance
on an Agile team?
A. Lead time
B. Velocity time
C. Cycle time
D. Takt time
35. Constraints are often called bottlenecks in
production systems. Once the bottlenecks are removed,
flow improves. This is an example of which of the
following?
A. The Theory of Constraints
B. The theory of cumulative experience
C. The theory of bottlenecks
D. The theory of limiting WIP
36. Jim is new to your team of developers and has a
small amount of Agile experience. You have been
tasked with explaining how your team is using a process
flow called ScrumBan. How might you explain ScrumBan
to Jim?
A. ScrumBan is more Scrum based.
B. ScrumBan is a hybrid approach that incorporates
aspects of both Scrum and Kanban.
C. ScrumBan is a made-up term and isn’t an actual
framework.
D. ScrumBan is a tailored approach using both Scrum
and Kanban.

6. 37. Any one of the team members can suggest that a
meeting of the minds might be necessary to switch
gears in the middle of an iteration. This is known as
what type of meeting?
A. Retrospective
B. Review
C. Stand-up meeting
D. Intraspective(s)
38. Your team is attempting to calculate their
throughput. So far, they have completed three
iterations.
Iteration 1: 17 story points were completed.
Iteration 2: 15 story points were completed.
Iteration 3: 19 story points were completed.
What is your team’s current throughput?
A. 19
B. 17
C. 15
D. 53
39. Your team practices a Kanban approach to project
management and prefers to use lead time rather than
velocity to track performance. You are explaining this to
a key stakeholder who isn’t well versed in Agile. How
would you explain the difference between lead time
tracking and velocity tracking?
A. Teams that use velocity to track performance would
want to increase velocity, and conversely, teams that
use a Kanban approach would want to decrease their
lead time.
B. Teams that use velocity to track performance would
want to decrease velocity, and conversely, teams that
use a Kanban approach would want to increase their
lead time.
C. Teams that use velocity to track performance would
want to increase velocity, and con- versely, teams that
use a Kanban approach would want to increase their
lead time.
D. Teams that use velocity to track performance would
want to decrease velocity, and conversely, teams that
use a Kanban approach would want to decrease their
lead time.
40. Large Scale Scrum, or LeSS, can best be described as
which one of the following?
A. LeSS is a product development framework that
extends some of the confines of Scrum but doesn’t
allow for scaling guidelines.
B. LeSS is a product development framework that
extends some of the confines of Scrum and allows for
scaling guidelines without losing the original purpose of
Scrum.
C. LeSS is a hybrid of both Scrum and Systematic
Systems thinking.
D. LeSS is just another way of saying Scrum with less
management.