A Scrum Team holds every event on schedule, keeps a burn-down chart and reviews its metrics carefully. For six Sprints running, the same impediment — a two-day wait for a shared test environment — has been named in the Retrospective, and nothing about it has changed. What is the accurate diagnosis?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Correct Inspection is happening and adaptation is not, which makes the inspection pointless
Correct. The team sees the problem every Sprint and changes nothing, which is precisely the failure Scrum names: inspection exists to provoke change, and inspection that provokes none has stopped paying for itself.
Not correct Transparency is missing, because the impediment is not visible to the people who could fix it
Wrong on the facts given. It is visible — it is named in every Retrospective. The breakdown is downstream of seeing it, which is what makes this case worth recognising.
Not correct The team is not inspecting often enough and should add a mid-Sprint Retrospective
Wrong. Adding a seventh inspection to a system that acted on none of the previous six adds cost and changes nothing. More inspection is the answer when you cannot see the problem, not when you can and do not act.
Not correct Nothing is wrong: all five events took place and the metrics were reviewed, so the framework is being followed
Wrong, and it is the most comfortable answer, which is why it is offered. Holding the events is not the purpose of the events. Scrum events are designed to provoke change, and an event that provokes none has lost its reason to exist.
Why
Scrum provides cadence in the form of its five events so that inspection happens frequently and diligently — but each pillar only earns its place through the next one. A team that has named the same impediment six times has a working inspection loop attached to nothing. The Scrum Master's move here is to cause the removal of the impediment, which is one of the four ways the Guide says a Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Inspection
- What it says
- Inspection enables adaptation. Inspection without adaptation is considered pointless.
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