A director hears that the Sprint Retrospective is where problems get discussed and asks the Scrum Master for a standing invitation, promising to "just listen". Two Developers privately say they will stop raising things if she is in the room. What should the Scrum Master do?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Not correct Invite her, since transparency is a Scrum pillar and the team should have nothing to hide
Wrong, and it is the trap dressed as a principle. Transparency in Scrum is about the artefacts and progress being visible, not about opening every event to every observer; the two Developers have already told you what it would cost.
Not correct Invite her for the first half and ask her to leave before improvements are agreed
Wrong. Splitting the event does not fix it — the half she attends is the half where problems are named, which is exactly the part the Developers said they would go quiet in.
Not correct Hold the Retrospective as normal and send her the list of improvements afterwards
Wrong. Reporting the team's improvement decisions upward as a deliverable turns the Retrospective into a source of management information, which changes what the team is willing to write down.
Correct Explain that the Retrospective is the Scrum Team's own inspection of how the last Sprint went, and offer her the Sprint Review instead, where stakeholders belong
Correct. The Retrospective inspects individuals, interactions, processes, tools and the Definition of Done — the team's own working. Stakeholder collaboration has an event of its own, and pointing her to it answers her real interest without costing the team its candour.
Why
Each Scrum event has a defined set of people because each has a defined purpose. The Sprint Review is where the Scrum Team and key stakeholders collaborate on what to do next; the Retrospective is where the Scrum Team looks at itself. A Scrum Master who cannot say no to a well-meaning invitation is not protecting the event, and the answer that costs nothing is usually to route the person to the event that was built for their question.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Retrospective
- What it says
- The Scrum Team inspects how the last Sprint went with regards to individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done.
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