Ninety minutes into Sprint Planning the Scrum Team has selected items and begun breaking them down, but has never discussed why this Sprint matters. The Scrum Master stops the room. What has to be true before Sprint Planning is allowed to end?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Correct The Sprint Goal must be finalised
Correct. Deciding why the Sprint is valuable is the first topic of Sprint Planning, the whole Scrum Team collaborates on it after the Product Owner proposes how value could increase, and Scrum requires it to be settled before the event ends.
Not correct Every selected item must be decomposed into work items of one day or less
Wrong. Decomposing into pieces of a day or less is a technique Scrum mentions as common, not a requirement, and how the work is planned is at the sole discretion of the Developers.
Not correct The Product Owner must have accepted the Developers' estimates for the selected items
Wrong. There is no acceptance step. Sizing is the Developers' responsibility; the Product Owner influences it by helping them understand and select trade-offs.
Not correct The Definition of Done must be reviewed and re-agreed for this Sprint
Wrong. The Definition of Done is a standard for the product, or for the organisation, and it does not get renegotiated Sprint by Sprint. It is inspected in the Sprint Retrospective, not reset in Sprint Planning.
Why
Sprint Planning answers three questions in order: why is this Sprint valuable, what can be Done this Sprint, and how will the chosen work get done. The first is the one teams skip, and skipping it is expensive — without a Sprint Goal there is nothing to protect the Sprint from change, nothing for the Daily Scrum to inspect progress against, and nothing to commit to at the Sprint Review. A Sprint Planning that produced a list of work and no Sprint Goal produced a to-do list, not a Sprint.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Planning
- What it says
- The Sprint Goal must be finalized prior to the end of Sprint Planning.
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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