A portfolio office asks a Scrum Team when the remaining forty Product Backlog items will be finished. The Developers extend their burn-up chart, and the office wants the resulting date entered in the plan as a delivery commitment. What is the accurate position in Scrum?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework hard
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The options
Not correct Charts of this kind have no place in Scrum, because Scrum defines no metrics and no forecasting practices
Wrong. Scrum names burn-downs, burn-ups and cumulative flows and calls them proven useful. The framework does not forbid them; it refuses to let them stand in for evidence.
Not correct Once the Definition of Done is stable and the team's throughput is steady, the projected date can be reported as a commitment
Wrong, and it is the tempting one because both conditions sound like the marks of a mature team. Stability of past measurement says nothing about what the next forty items will reveal, and in complex work what will happen is unknown.
Correct The projection is a forecast that each Sprint's evidence is expected to revise — only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making
Correct. The chart is a legitimate aid and a legitimate answer to give, provided it is offered as the extrapolation of observed work that it is, and re-drawn every Sprint as new observations arrive.
Not correct The Scrum Master should produce the forecast, as a neutral party accountable for the Scrum Team's effectiveness
Wrong. Effectiveness is served by enabling the team to improve its own practices, not by taking over its judgements. A forecast about the work belongs to the people who will do the work.
Why
Scrum is unusually careful here: forecasting practices are useful and they do not replace empiricism. The distinction that survives the exam room is between a projection and a promise. A projection is drawn from what has already been observed and is expected to move; a promise asks future evidence to conform to a number set before the evidence existed. Scrum permits the first freely and has no mechanism for the second: what the Sprint Backlog carries as its commitment is the Sprint Goal, an objective, not a date.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section The Sprint
- What it says
- Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making.
Practise this
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