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?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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The options
Not correct The programme manager — a team may not vary an organisational Definition of Done in either direction
Wrong. The standard binds as a floor, not as a ceiling. Freezing it in both directions would make it impossible for a team to raise quality for its own product, which is much of what a Retrospective is for.
Correct The team — an organisational Definition of Done must be followed as a minimum, so a team may hold itself to more
Correct. The word doing the work in the Guide is "minimum". Adding to it still complies; removing from it does not.
Not correct The team, and it may equally drop parts of the organisational standard that do not suit this product
Wrong, and it is the trap, because it looks like the same principle applied symmetrically. A minimum can be exceeded and never reduced, so dropping a clause takes the team below the standard.
Not correct Neither — the Product Owner sets the Definition of Done, so it is their decision
Wrong. The Definition of Done is not a Product Owner artefact. Where there is no organisational standard, the Scrum Team creates one appropriate for the product.
Why
Two sentences of the Guide settle every Definition of Done question of this shape. If the organisation has a standard, all Scrum Teams follow it as a minimum; if it does not, the Scrum Team must create one appropriate for the product. So a team's self-management over quality runs upward only. Note also what happens with several teams on one product: they must mutually define and comply with the same Definition of Done.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Commitment: Definition of Done
- What it says
- If the Definition of Done for an increment is part of the standards of the organization, all Scrum Teams must follow it as a minimum.
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
- 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