Question 1
A mature Agile team is consistently struggling to complete all planned user stories within their two-week sprints, leading to frequent scope spillover. The burndown chart shows a steep drop only in the last two days of the iteration. During the retrospective, the team identifies that manual regression testing of the entire application is consuming over 40% of the sprint time. Which action would be the most effective long-term solution to improve the team's velocity and predictability?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D
The core issue is the unsustainable manual regression effort, which is a common problem as an Agile project grows. Automating the regression suite and integrating it into a CI pipeline provides rapid feedback without consuming valuable sprint time. This directly addresses the root cause, freeing up testers to focus on new features and exploratory testing. Extending sprints or adding hardening sprints are anti-patterns that delay feedback. Risk-based testing is a good practice but doesn't solve the underlying scalability problem of manual regression.