A delivery manager who is not on the Scrum Team tells the Scrum Master to cut the Sprint Retrospective on one-month Sprints from three hours to forty-five minutes, "because three hours of talking is waste". The team in fact usually finishes in about ninety minutes. Who decides how long the event runs?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct The delivery manager, since the organisation pays for the time and may set the limits it can afford
Wrong. The Scrum Team is structured and empowered by the organisation to manage its own work; setting the length of its inspection events from outside is exactly the empowerment Scrum requires the organisation to give up.
Correct The Scrum Team, which ends the event once its purpose is met
Correct. The Scrum Team is self-managing — it internally decides who does what, when and how — so how it spends the time inside the timebox is its own call. Three hours is a ceiling, not a booking to defend or a length to impose, and ninety minutes that improve the next Sprint is a successful Retrospective.
Not correct The Scrum Master, who owns the events and therefore sets their duration
Wrong, and it is the most tempting one because the Scrum Master does serve the events. The service is ensuring they happen, are positive and productive and stay within the timebox — not owning them or deciding the agenda's length.
Not correct Nobody — the three hours are fixed and the team must use them all
Wrong. Treating a maximum as a mandatory duration is the same mistake as ignoring it, and it teaches the organisation that Scrum is a set of meetings to sit through.
Why
Two different people are wrong here in opposite directions, which is why the item is worth sitting with: the manager is shortening an event he does not own, and a Scrum Master who simply overrules him has claimed the same ownership from the other side. A self-managing team decides how it spends the time inside a timebox. The Scrum Master's job is to keep the ceiling honest and to make the event productive enough that nobody outside wants to shorten it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
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