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?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct Nothing is wrong — a self-managing team owns its plan and owes nobody a view of it mid-Sprint
Wrong, and it is the misreading this lesson exists to kill. Owning the plan and hiding the plan are different things; the Sprint Backlog is described as a highly visible, real-time picture precisely so that ownership does not become opacity.
Not correct The stakeholder should be given a daily status report by the Scrum Master, so the team keeps its own plan private
Wrong. Adding a reporting channel around the team leaves the artefact untrustworthy and makes the Scrum Master a proxy for information the team should be making visible itself.
Correct Transparency is missing — the work must be visible to those performing it as well as those receiving it
Correct. Low transparency leads to decisions that diminish value and increase risk, and the Developers are among the people being misled — they inspect their own progress in the Daily Scrum using that same artefact.
Not correct The Sprint Backlog should be handed to the Product Owner to maintain, since they answer to stakeholders
Wrong. The Sprint Backlog is a plan by and for the Developers. Moving its upkeep to the Product Owner would take from the Developers the plan they are accountable for adapting each day.
Why
Self-management never buys exemption from transparency, because transparency is what makes self-management safe to grant. The empirical chain runs one way only: transparency enables inspection, inspection enables adaptation. A team that hides its plan has not become independent, it has removed its own ability to inspect — and the Developers are the first ones to be misled by an artefact that no longer matches reality.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Transparency
- What it says
- The emergent process and work must be visible to those performing the work as well as those receiving the work.
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
- 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
- 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