A team introduces a formal gate: no Product Backlog item may be selected at Sprint Planning until the Product Owner has signed it off in a readiness review and stakeholders have approved its acceptance criteria. Which TWO statements reflect what Scrum says about an item being ready for selection?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Choose 2.
Correct Items that can be Done by the Scrum Team within one Sprint are deemed ready for selection in a Sprint Planning event
Correct. Readiness in Scrum is one property and it is about size against the Definition of Done — can this team finish this, to its quality bar, inside one Sprint.
Not correct An item becomes ready when the Product Owner has formally signed it off in a readiness review
Wrong. Scrum has no sign-off step anywhere, and inventing one puts a scheduled gate in front of a continuous activity. The Product Owner already shapes the item by writing and ordering it.
Correct Items usually acquire the degree of transparency that makes them selectable after refining activities
Correct. Refinement is how an item gets small and clear enough to be selected — an ongoing act of breaking down and further defining items, not a ceremony with a pass mark.
Not correct An item becomes ready once the Developers have sized it and the Scrum Master has confirmed the estimate
Wrong on the second half. Sizing is indeed the Developers' responsibility, but no one confirms their estimate, and a Scrum Master validating numbers would be taking a decision the framework deliberately leaves with the people doing the work.
Why
Scrum describes readiness as a state an item reaches, not a gate it passes: small enough to be Done within one Sprint, usually reached through refining. Scrum defines no approval before selection, and a gate built in front of refinement does the opposite of what refinement is for — it slows the flow of items and hands a self-managing team a queue to wait in. Compare the Definition of Done, which Scrum does define, and which is binding.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Backlog
- What it says
- Product Backlog items that can be Done by the Scrum Team within one Sprint are deemed ready for selection in a Sprint Planning event.
Practise this
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