A new Scrum Team keeps stalling: nobody picks up the awkward integration work, and each morning the Developers look to the Scrum Master to say who should take what. The Scrum Master has been doing so, and the team is now running smoothly. What is the problem with this?
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
Correct The Scrum Master's part is to coach the team members in self-management, and allocating the work for them prevents the team from ever learning to do it
Correct. The accountability is for the team's effectiveness, achieved by enabling the team to improve its practices — not by supplying the decisions the team is meant to make.
Not correct Nothing, as long as the Scrum Master stops once the team is experienced enough
Wrong, and it is the most seductive option because it sounds like sensible phasing. A team that has been given its decisions daily has no reason to develop the habit, so the handover date never arrives.
Not correct Nothing, since the Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team's effectiveness and the team is effective
Wrong. That accountability is discharged by enabling the Scrum Team to improve its practices within the framework, which is a different act from making its decisions.
Not correct The problem is only that the allocation happens in the Daily Scrum; doing it at Sprint Planning instead would be fine
Wrong. Moving the same directive act to a different event changes nothing about who decided. The event is not what makes it wrong.
Why
A Scrum Master serves self-management rather than exercising it. The distinction that answers the exam's version of this is between removing an impediment and removing a decision: causing the removal of impediments is squarely the Scrum Master's, while deciding who takes the awkward work is the Developers'. When a team asks the Scrum Master to decide, the useful response is to make the decision easier to take, not to take it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality;
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