At the Sprint Review a governance lead presents a checklist and states that no Increment may go to customers until he and two department heads have signed the minutes of the Review. The Developers have built an Increment that meets the Definition of Done. How should the Scrum Master respond?
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
Not correct Accept the checklist as the organisation's Definition of Done for this product
Wrong. The Definition of Done is a quality standard the Increment must meet before it is called Done, and it is applied by the Developers as they work — not a panel convened afterwards to give permission.
Not correct Add a separate approval meeting after the Sprint Review so the Review itself stays a working session
Wrong, and it is the tempting compromise because it appears to protect the event. It protects the room and keeps the gate, and Scrum's events exist precisely to minimise the need for meetings not defined in Scrum.
Correct Explain that the Sprint Review is a working session for deciding what to do next, and never a gate to releasing value
Correct. The event exists so that the Scrum Team and stakeholders inspect the outcome of the Sprint and collaborate on what to do next, not so an Increment can be approved. The Guide says outright that the Review should never be considered a gate to releasing value — an Increment may even be delivered to stakeholders before the Sprint ends.
Not correct Ask the Product Owner to obtain the three signatures before every Sprint Review so the event is not held up
Wrong. This makes the Product Owner the clerk of a gate Scrum does not have; collecting the signatures earlier keeps the gate intact and simply moves it off the agenda of the event it is spoiling.
Why
A Sprint Review turned into a sign-off gate fails twice: the inspection stops being honest, because nobody shows a stakeholder a problem in a meeting that decides approval, and the adaptation stops happening, because the outcome is a verdict rather than an adjusted Product Backlog. The Review is where the Scrum Team and stakeholders work out what to do next. When somebody asks for a gate, the useful question is what risk they are trying to manage, and whether the Definition of Done should be carrying it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Increment
- What it says
- The Sprint Review should never be considered a gate to releasing value.
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