At Sprint Planning the Developers select eleven Product Backlog items. At the Sprint Review, nine are Done and the Sprint Goal has been met. A manager tells the Scrum Master that the team "broke its commitment" and should be held to its number next time. How should the Scrum Master respond?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework hard
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The options
Correct The commitment is to the Sprint Goal, not to the selected items, and the Sprint Goal was met
Correct. The Sprint Backlog carries exactly one commitment, the Sprint Goal, and it deliberately leaves flexibility about the exact work needed to achieve it. The eleven items were a forecast made at the point of least knowledge.
Not correct Agree, and coach the Developers to select fewer items so that they always finish everything they take on
Wrong. This treats a forecast as a promise and buys reliability with padding. The predictable result is a team that under-selects, hides slack, and stops telling anyone what it actually learned during the Sprint.
Not correct Agree, because two items failed to meet the Definition of Done, so the Sprint failed
Wrong reasoning. The two items simply are not Done and return to the Product Backlog. The Definition of Done is a quality standard for the Increment; it says nothing about how many items a Sprint should contain.
Not correct Explain that commitment in Scrum only refers to the Scrum Team committing to attend all five events
Wrong, and a caricature of the value. Commitment is about committing to goals and to supporting each other, and it is also the name Scrum gives to the thing attached to each artifact. Neither meaning is about attendance.
Why
The word commitment does two jobs in Scrum and neither is a promise to deliver a fixed number of items. It is a value — committing to the goals and to each other — and it is the name for what each artifact carries: the Product Goal for the Product Backlog, the Sprint Goal for the Sprint Backlog, the Definition of Done for the Increment. The selected items are a forecast; the Sprint Goal is the commitment.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Commitment: Sprint Goal
- What it says
- Although the Sprint Goal is a commitment by the Developers, it provides flexibility in terms of the exact work needed to achieve it.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
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