PMI-ACP Certification Study Guide 2026: Pass the Agile Exam

What Is the PMI-ACP?

The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) is PMI's dedicated agile credential. It recognizes professionals who can apply agile principles, tools, and techniques across a range of frameworks — Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP, and SAFe — rather than being limited to a single methodology. Employers increasingly seek the PMI-ACP because it signals practical agile experience, not just theoretical knowledge of one framework.

To be eligible, you need 2,000 hours of general project experience (within the last 5 years), 1,500 hours of agile project experience, and 21 contact hours of agile education. There is no requirement to hold the PMP first, though many candidates do.

The 7 Exam Domains

The PMI-ACP exam is organized across seven performance domains, each covering specific agile competencies:

• Agile Principles and Mindset (16%): Agile Manifesto values and principles, servant leadership, continuous improvement, and creating a safe-to-fail environment.
• Value-Driven Delivery (20%): Defining value, prioritizing the backlog, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and managing technical debt.
• Stakeholder Engagement (17%): Building trust, managing expectations, wire-framing, and user story workshops.
• Team Performance (16%): Self-organizing teams, team formation stages (Tuckman model), team velocity, and conflict resolution.
• Adaptive Planning (12%): Rolling wave planning, release planning, iteration planning, and planning poker.
• Problem Detection and Resolution (10%): Risk-adjusted backlog, impediment logs, retrospectives, and escaped defects.
• Continuous Improvement (9%): Kaizen, process tailoring, retrospective outputs, and knowledge sharing.

What the Agile Practice Guide Tests

The PMI Agile Practice Guide — co-created by PMI and the Agile Alliance — is the primary reference document for the PMI-ACP exam. It covers the full agile landscape: core values and principles, life cycle selection (predictive vs. agile vs. hybrid), Scrum, Kanban, XP practices, and implementation considerations. Unlike the PMBOK, the Agile Practice Guide is relatively concise and readable — plan to read it twice.

Key topics from the guide that appear heavily on the exam: the servant leader role, Definition of Done vs. Definition of Ready, velocity and throughput metrics, cumulative flow diagrams, information radiators, and the difference between output and outcome.

PMI-ACP vs. PMP: Key Differences

• Scope: PMP covers both predictive and agile project management; PMI-ACP focuses exclusively on agile methods.
• Depth: PMI-ACP goes deeper on agile-specific tools (cumulative flow diagrams, cycle time, throughput, escape rate) that the PMP only touches on.
• Exam length: PMI-ACP has 120 questions in 3 hours; PMP has 180 questions in 230 minutes.
• PDUs: After certification, PMI-ACP requires 30 PDUs per 3-year cycle (all in agile); PMP requires 60 PDUs with a broader category mix.

Recommended Study Resources

• PMI Agile Practice Guide — free with PMI membership; the closest thing to an official textbook for this exam.
• Mike Griffiths' PMI-ACP Exam Prep — considered the most comprehensive third-party study book for this credential.
• Joseph Phillips's PMI-ACP course on Udemy — good video content covering all seven domains with practice questions.
• PM PrepCast PMI-ACP simulator — 700+ exam-style questions with rationales, ideal for the final 3 to 4 weeks of prep.
• Certify Copilot AI — use it alongside any practice question bank to instantly understand why situational agile questions have a specific answer. Visit the pricing page to get started free.