A Product Owner and the Developers are arguing about who settles what during refinement. The Product Owner has been rewriting the Developers' estimates downward and reordering the Product Backlog, and the Developers have been proposing a different order for the top ten items. Which two statements are correct? (Choose two.)
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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
Choose 2.
Not correct The Developers decide the order of the Product Backlog, since they will be doing the work
Wrong. Ordering Product Backlog items is one of the Product Owner's accountabilities, and doing the work confers no claim over it.
Correct The Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing
Correct. The Guide is flat about it — the Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing — which is why a Product Owner rewriting estimates downward is overreaching.
Not correct The Product Owner may not discuss sizes at all, as that would compromise the Developers' self-management
Wrong, and it overcorrects in the way self-managing teams often do. The Product Owner may influence the Developers by helping them understand and select trade-offs; what they may not do is set the number.
Correct The Product Owner decides the order of the Product Backlog, and those wanting it changed can try to convince them
Correct. The Developers can and should argue for a different order — persuasion is the route Scrum provides — but the decision stays with the Product Owner.
Why
Self-management is bounded by the other accountabilities rather than superior to them. The clean split to remember is that the Product Owner owns what and in what order, and the Developers own how much it costs and how it will be built. Each side may influence the other and neither may overwrite it, which is why the exam's version of this scenario always has somebody quietly editing a decision that was not theirs.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.
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