A delivery manager has asked that the Sprint Backlog be frozen at the start of each Sprint and that any change to it be requested through her, so that the weekly report to the steering group stays accurate. Which position is correct?
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
Not correct Freezing is acceptable because a Sprint Backlog is a commitment the Developers made at Sprint Planning
Wrong, and it confuses two things. The Sprint Goal is the commitment; the selected items and the plan are a forecast that is expected to change as more is learned.
Correct The Sprint Backlog is a plan by and for the Developers and is updated throughout the Sprint as more is learned, so neither the freeze nor the change requests belong
Correct. A frozen plan stops being a real-time picture of the work, which destroys the transparency the report was trying to protect.
Not correct The freeze is fine as long as the Developers keep a private, accurate copy of their real plan
Wrong, and it is the compromise teams genuinely reach. Two plans means the visible one is decorative and the inspected artefact is a fiction — worse than no report at all.
Not correct The Product Owner decides, since they answer to the steering group for progress
Wrong. Progress reporting does not transfer the Developers' plan to the Product Owner. Scope may be renegotiated with the Product Owner, but the plan for delivering it stays with the Developers.
Why
The Sprint Backlog is the artefact through which the Developers exercise self-management, which is why it is described as a plan by and for them and why it must carry enough detail for them to inspect their progress in the Daily Scrum. Any arrangement that makes changing it someone else's decision — a freeze, a change board, an approval — takes the daily adaptation the Developers are accountable for and puts it outside the team.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Backlog
- What it says
- The Sprint Backlog is a plan by and for the Developers.
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