CAPM - Agile Frameworks/Methodologies (20% of the exam) - Section 3.3

Use adaptive planning and tracking techniques including user stories, story points, velocity, and information radiators such as burndown charts.

Write requirements as user stories with acceptance criteria, estimate them relatively in story points, and use velocity to forecast how much the team can deliver per iteration. Read information radiators such as burndown and burnup charts and Kanban boards, and recognise that work-in-progress limits in Kanban expose bottlenecks and improve flow.

User storiesStory pointsVelocityBurndown chartKanbanWork-in-progress limits

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleAgile Frameworks/Methodologiesmedium

Team Kestrel has averaged 18 story points completed per two-week sprint over its last five sprints, and this average is stable. The product backlog for the current release holds 90 story points of remaining work. Based on this velocity, roughly how many more sprints should the team forecast to finish the remaining work?

AAbout 2 sprints, because a healthy team can usually pull extra scope forward once it settles into a rhythm.
BAbout 3 sprints, because the team should stretch its commitment to hit the release sooner.
CAbout 8 sprints, because forecasts should pad heavily for the risk that some stories are larger than estimated.
DAbout 5 sprints, because 90 remaining points divided by the stable velocity of 18 points per sprint gives 5. Correct

Forecast remaining schedule by dividing the remaining backlog size in story points by the team's demonstrated average velocity. Velocity is the average number of story points a team completes per sprint. A release forecast divides the remaining points by that measured velocity, so 90 points at 18 points per sprint yields 5 sprints rather than an optimistic or padded guess.

Why A is wrong: This assumes the team will suddenly deliver far above its measured velocity, which the stable five-sprint average gives no reason to expect, so it badly under-forecasts the work.

Why B is wrong: Forecasting is based on demonstrated velocity, not on an aspiration to stretch; 90 divided by 18 is 5, so 3 sprints assumes a velocity of 30 that the team has never shown.

Why C is wrong: Story point estimates already carry relative uncertainty, and velocity smooths it across sprints, so nearly doubling the arithmetic forecast to 8 over-inflates the timeline without justification.

Why D is correct: Dividing the remaining backlog size by the team's demonstrated average velocity is the standard adaptive forecast; 90 divided by 18 equals 5 sprints.

See more CAPM practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Agile Frameworks/Methodologies

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the CAPM bank for this domain.

About 5 iterations, dividing the remaining points by the team's highest recorded velocity
Why it is wrong: Using the single best iteration of 34 points is tempting because it looks efficient, but forecasting on a peak rather than the average overstates the team's sustainable pace and understates the schedule.
Independent, because the story depends on another item in the backlog before it can start
Why it is wrong: Independent addresses whether a story can be worked without being tied to another item's completion. The scenario describes size and splittability, not a sequencing dependency, so this mislabels the defect.
Iteration planning, which selects and breaks down the work for the single coming iteration
Why it is wrong: Iteration planning is tempting because it is also forward planning, but it commits only the next iteration's stories and tasks rather than the multi-iteration goal and feature set.

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