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?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct The breakdown stands, because architecture decisions sit above the Scrum Team
Wrong. Scrum places no architectural authority above the Developers. An architect can advise, and often should, but advice that cannot be declined is an instruction.
Not correct The Product Owner decides which breakdown to adopt, since they own what is delivered
Wrong. The Product Owner owns why the Sprint is valuable and which items are candidates; the plan for turning those items into an Increment is not theirs to choose.
Not correct The architect may not attend Sprint Planning at all, as it is an event for the Scrum Team
Wrong, and it overcorrects. The Scrum Team may invite other people to Sprint Planning to provide advice. The problem is not the architect's presence, it is the instruction.
Correct The Developers decide how the work gets done; the architect's breakdown is advice they may take or leave
Correct. How selected items become Increments is at the sole discretion of the Developers, which is what makes an outsider's plan an input rather than a decision.
Why
Sprint Planning splits the decisions cleanly: the Product Owner proposes value, the whole Scrum Team shapes the Sprint Goal, the Developers select the items through discussion with the Product Owner, and then the Developers alone plan the how. That last boundary is the one PSM I probes, usually by putting a plausible expert in the room. Expertise is welcome; the decision still belongs to the people doing the work.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Topic Three: How will the chosen work get done?
- What it says
- How this is done is at the sole discretion of the Developers. No one else tells them how to turn Product Backlog items into Increments of value.
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
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- 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
- 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