In every Daily Scrum the Developers stand in a circle and each one reports yesterday, today and blockers to the Scrum Master, who writes the blockers down and answers questions. Nobody has mentioned the Sprint Goal in a fortnight. What should the Scrum Master do?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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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 Keep the three questions but ask the Developers to address them to each other instead
Wrong, though it is the closest miss here: changing who people face does not change what the event produces. The problem is not the seating, it is that nobody is inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal or replanning the day.
Correct Step out of the centre and coach the Developers to run the event around progress toward the Sprint Goal and the next day's plan
Correct. The Daily Scrum belongs to the Developers, who may choose whatever structure they like provided it focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day. A Scrum Master receiving reports has quietly become the audience the event is performed for.
Not correct Hand the facilitation to the Product Owner, who can then relay progress to stakeholders
Wrong. That swaps one audience for another and gives the Developers' planning event to someone else. The Product Owner attends the Daily Scrum as a Developer only when actively working on Sprint Backlog items.
Not correct Replace the Daily Scrum with a shared board the Scrum Master reviews each morning
Wrong. Removing an event is not a fix for running it badly, and a board tells you where work sits, not what the Developers now intend to do about the Sprint Goal today.
Why
The Daily Scrum has one purpose — inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog — and Scrum deliberately leaves its format open so that purpose, not a script, drives it. The status-report failure is diagnosable by asking one question: if the Scrum Master left the room, would the event still be worth holding? If the answer is no, the Developers are not self-managing their day, they are reporting on it, and the Scrum Master's service is to coach that back rather than to preside over it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Daily Scrum
- What it says
- The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work.
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