An organisation proposes that a central operations group take over running and maintaining the product once features are released, and that a separate discovery group do the customer research, leaving the Scrum Team to build. The Product Owner asks the Scrum Master whether this is compatible with Scrum. What should the Scrum Master say?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Not correct It is compatible, because the Developers are accountable only for creating a usable Increment each Sprint
Wrong, and it is the most quotable of the wrong answers. Scrum says Developers are committed to creating any aspect of a usable Increment, and then lists four things they are always accountable for — so 'accountable only for' is false twice over, and the Scrum Team's remit is stated separately and much more broadly.
Not correct It is compatible provided the Scrum Master runs a weekly coordination meeting between the three groups
Wrong. Adding a meeting to bridge a split is the reflex Scrum events exist to make unnecessary, and it leaves the underlying problem — three groups holding one product between them — exactly where it was.
Not correct It is compatible as long as the Product Owner keeps one Product Backlog covering the work of all three groups
Wrong, though it is the closest to right and therefore the trap. One backlog preserves transparency about what needs doing; it does nothing about the fact that operating and researching the product have been moved outside the team accountable for it.
Correct It contradicts Scrum, because the Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities — operation, maintenance, research, experimentation and stakeholder collaboration included
Correct. Scrum names that list precisely so nobody can carve the product into a build phase and a run phase. Feedback from operating the thing is exactly the observation the next Sprint is supposed to be adapted from.
Why
The Scrum Team is cross-functional in a stronger sense than most organisations assume: the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint, and the team is responsible for every product-related activity, not for a construction stage inside someone else's process. Hand operation or discovery to another group and the empirical loop is cut — the people who could adapt no longer see what happened, and the people who see it cannot adapt.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- The Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required.
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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