CSM Study Guide 2026
Everything you need to pass the CSM exam in one place: the exam format, every topic to study, real practice questions with explanations, flashcards, and full-length practice tests. Free, no sign-up needed.
📋 CSM Exam Format at a Glance
📚 CSM Topics to Study (69)
✍️ Sample CSM Questions & Answers
1. In earned value management, the Budget at Completion (BAC) represents:
BAC is the total approved budget assigned to the project scope and serves as the baseline against which performance is measured.
2. A CSM is using a burndown chart and notices the actual line is consistently above the ideal line. This indicates:
When the actual burndown line sits above the ideal line, remaining work exceeds what should be left at that point, signaling the team is behind pace.
3. What is the primary purpose of a balanced scorecard in software management strategy?
The balanced scorecard translates an organization's vision into a set of performance measures spanning four perspectives to ensure holistic alignment.
4. A software organization aligns its IT strategy directly to business strategy by ensuring IT investments support organizational goals. This alignment is known as:
IT-business strategic alignment ensures technology investments directly support and enable the organization's strategic objectives.
5. A software company conducts a competitive analysis and discovers it has a unique, hard-to-replicate algorithm. According to the Resource-Based View (RBV), this is best described as:
RBV holds that resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) create sustainable competitive advantage.
6. In software project management, what is a 'sprint' most closely associated with?
A sprint is a fixed-length iteration (typically 1-4 weeks) in Scrum where a usable product increment is delivered.