A Scrum Team on one-month Sprints reaches the eighth hour of Sprint Planning. A Sprint Goal has been agreed and items are selected, but the Developers have detailed the plan for only about half of them. What should happen?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct The event is extended by two hours so the plan can be completed properly
Wrong, and it is the honest-looking answer. But the Scrum Master serves the events by keeping them within the timebox, and a plan whose detail is bought with overrun is a plan nobody will believe by day four.
Not correct The Sprint is delayed by a day so Sprint Planning can reconvene in the morning
Wrong. A new Sprint starts immediately after the previous one concludes, so the day is not free — it is a day of the new Sprint spent without a plan the team is already able to act on.
Not correct The Developers drop the undetailed items from the Sprint Backlog so the plan matches the time available
Wrong. Undetailed is not the same as unselected. Dropping work the team believes it can do, purely because a clock ran out, damages the Sprint Goal rather than the plan.
Correct Sprint Planning ends at the timebox and the Sprint starts; the Developers continue to detail the plan during the Sprint as more becomes known
Correct. The Sprint Backlog is an emergent plan, not a finished document, and a Sprint Goal plus selected items is enough to begin. The timebox is kept and the remaining planning happens inside the Sprint, where the Developers were going to learn most of it anyway.
Why
Sprint Planning has to deliver a Sprint Goal and a selection of items with enough plan to start; it does not have to deliver a complete plan, because the Sprint Backlog is updated throughout the Sprint as more is learned. The exam room version of this rule: timeboxes are never extended, and the question to ask when one is reached is not "are we finished?" but "can the Developers begin?"
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Planning
- What it says
- Sprint Planning is timeboxed to a maximum of eight 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