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?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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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 Accept it and have the Developers re-plan quietly, since line management outranks a Sprint
Wrong, and it is what usually happens. Absorbing the loss silently hides the cost of the interruption from everyone who could have prevented it, which is precisely the transparency the framework exists to create.
Correct Work with the department head and the Scrum Team on the impact to the Sprint Goal, and coach the organisation on why it structures and empowers the team to manage its own work
Correct. Serving the organisation by leading, training and coaching its Scrum adoption is squarely the Scrum Master's, and this is the occasion for it: Scrum Teams are structured and empowered by the organisation to manage their own work, so an organisation that pulls a Developer mid-Sprint is undoing something it set up. That is a coaching conversation, not a scheduling one.
Not correct Refuse on the Scrum Team's behalf and forbid the reassignment
Wrong, and tempting because the instinct is right. A Scrum Master has no authority to veto a manager, and asserting one would replace one command relationship with another rather than making the impact visible.
Not correct Cancel the Sprint, since the plan can no longer be met as written
Wrong on two counts. Only the Product Owner may cancel a Sprint, and the trigger is a Sprint Goal that has become obsolete — not a Sprint that has become harder.
Why
Self-management is not something a team declares; it is something the organisation confers and then has to keep honouring. Pulling a Developer out mid-Sprint is the commonest way that grant is quietly withdrawn. The move to remember for the exam is neither to veto the manager nor to absorb the loss quietly, but to make the consequence to the Sprint Goal visible to the person making the decision and let them decide with the cost in front of them.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Leading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;
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
- 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? 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