A team lead who sits outside the Scrum Team has taken to opening the board every Monday and assigning each Sprint Backlog item to a named Developer for the week. The Developers say the assignments rarely match who is best placed to pick the work up. Who decides which Developer works on which item?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Not correct The team lead, since somebody has to balance the load across the individuals
Wrong, and it is the arrangement most organisations actually run. Load balancing is a real problem, but Scrum solves it by giving the people doing the work the authority to move it, not by appointing someone above them to allocate it.
Not correct The Product Owner, because the items are theirs and the ordering expresses their priorities
Wrong. The Product Owner decides what is worth doing and in what order; they do not decide which pair of hands does it. Ordering the Product Backlog and allocating work inside a Sprint are two different decisions.
Correct The Developers themselves, because a Scrum Team internally decides who does what, when and how
Correct. Self-management is exactly this decision. The Guide puts who, when and how inside the team, which leaves nobody outside it with a say over task allocation.
Not correct The Scrum Master, who allocates the work in the Daily Scrum so it stays balanced
Wrong. A Scrum Master coaches the team in self-management; taking over the allocation is the fastest way to remove it. It also makes the Daily Scrum a reporting line rather than the Developers' own re-planning.
Why
Self-management is not a mood or a culture — it is a specific transfer of three decisions to the team: who does what, when and how. Once you know which three, the exam's allocation questions answer themselves, because every option that puts a name on a task from outside the Scrum Team is wrong regardless of how reasonable the outsider's motive is. The Product Owner still owns order; the Developers own allocation.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
- On day four of a two-week Sprint, a department head tells one of the five Developers to spend the rest of the week on a customer escalation for another product. The Sprint Goal depends on that Developer's work. What should the Scrum Master do? machine-checked
- During Sprint Planning, a solution architect who is not on the Scrum Team hands the Developers a task breakdown for each selected Product Backlog item and asks them to follow it. The Developers had planned to decompose the work differently. What does Scrum say about this? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is reworking its Daily Scrum. They are tired of three questions each and want to try walking the board right to left instead, and they also want to know how much else about the event they are free to change. Which two of the following are genuinely theirs to decide? (Choose two.) machine-checked
- A Scrum Team has stopped keeping its Sprint Backlog current, and when a stakeholder asks how the Sprint is going the Developers reply that they are self-managing and will show the result at the Sprint Review. Two Sprints in a row have then missed the Sprint Goal. What is wrong here? machine-checked
- With three days of the Sprint left, the Developers agree among themselves to skip the security review and the automated regression suite, both of which are in the Definition of Done, so that two more items can be finished. They argue that as a self-managing team it is their call. Is it? machine-checked
- An organisation publishes a Definition of Done that all its products must meet. In a Retrospective, one Scrum Team decides it wants to add accessibility testing and a documented rollback plan to its own Definition of Done, which the organisational standard does not mention. A programme manager objects that the standard is the standard. Who is right? machine-checked