A Scrum Team routinely finishes coding by day seven and then waits until day eleven for a separate quality assurance department to test the work, which means several items miss the Sprint. The Developers say testing is not their job. What does Scrum expect of this team?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams easy
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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 That the Product Owner negotiates guaranteed turnaround times with the quality assurance department
Wrong. A service level agreement around the dependency manages the symptom and leaves the team unable to produce a Done Increment on its own.
Correct That the Scrum Team be cross-functional, holding all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint, so that testing is inside the team
Correct. Cross-functionality is the condition that makes self-management possible — a team that cannot finish without an outside queue does not really decide when its work gets done.
Not correct That the Definition of Done be relaxed to exclude the department's testing
Wrong, and it is the tempting shortcut. Lowering the bar to fit the constraint makes the Increment less trustworthy and hides the dependency rather than resolving it.
Not correct That the Scrum Master be made accountable for chasing the testing queue each Sprint
Wrong. A Scrum Master causes the removal of impediments, but becoming the permanent expediter of a handoff entrenches it instead of removing it.
Why
Cross-functional and self-managing are stated in the same breath for a reason: a team can only decide who does what, when and how if the skills to do it are actually in the room. Every external handoff quietly returns some of those decisions to whoever owns the queue. Note that having the skills does not mean every member has every skill — it means the team collectively can create value each Sprint, and can acquire skills as needed.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint.
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