A team running two-week Sprints books four hours for every Sprint Review because "four hours is what Scrum says". Stakeholders leave after ninety minutes and the last two hours are spent on unrelated discussion. What is the accurate position?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams easy
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The options
Correct The Scrum Master should raise it: four hours is the maximum for a one-month Sprint, and for shorter Sprints the event is usually shorter
Correct. Every published figure in Scrum is an upper bound stated for a one-month Sprint. A Sprint Review that achieves its purpose in ninety minutes has succeeded; the extra time is not owed to anybody.
Not correct The booking is right and the team should find more content to fill the four hours
Wrong. This is the classic inversion of a timebox into a target, and it turns an inspection event into a meeting people endure. Scrum defines a ceiling, never a quota.
Not correct Four hours applies to Sprints of any length, since the timebox is fixed by the Guide
Wrong, and it is the most defensible error because the number is real. It is stated for a one-month Sprint, and shorter Sprints normally need less.
Not correct The Scrum Master should shorten the booking to ninety minutes and enforce that as the new timebox
Wrong. Setting a shorter ceiling by decree replaces one imposed number with another. How long the event needs is a matter for the Scrum Team, informed by whether its purpose is being met.
Why
Timeboxes in Scrum are maxima, and every one of them is quoted for a one-month Sprint — eight hours for Sprint Planning, four for the Sprint Review, three for the Sprint Retrospective, with the Daily Scrum's fifteen minutes the one figure that does not scale. The Scrum Master's service is to keep events within the timebox, not to keep them at it. An event ends when it has done what it exists to do.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Review
- What it says
- The Sprint Review is the second to last event of the Sprint and is timeboxed to a maximum of four hours for a one-month 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