Three days before a launch, the Developers ask to skip this Sprint's Retrospective and hold "a big one after the launch instead". They are not asking to shorten it; they want the event dropped. What does the Scrum Master do?
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 Agree to skip it once, since a self-managing team may decide how it uses its time
Wrong, and it is the most persuasive distractor because self-management is real. Self-management governs how the team works inside Scrum, not whether the framework's events happen; dropping one is a decision to stop inspecting and adapting.
Not correct Escalate to the Product Owner and ask her to require the team to attend
Wrong. The Product Owner has no authority over how the Developers work, and compelling attendance through her produces a room of people waiting for the hour to end.
Correct Hold the event — and make the launch pressure its subject, since that is now the team's most useful thing to inspect
Correct. The Scrum Master ensures the events take place, and the strongest form of that is not insistence but making the event obviously worth the hour. A team under launch pressure has more to improve than a comfortable one, not less.
Not correct Cancel the event and add the improvement discussion to the next Sprint Planning
Wrong. Sprint Planning is timeboxed for laying out the coming Sprint's work, and folding a Retrospective into it means one of the two gets the leftovers — usually the reflection.
Why
Skipping an event is not a scheduling decision, it is a decision to give up an inspection point, and the Guide is blunt that failing to operate the events as prescribed loses the chance to inspect and adapt. But a Scrum Master who wins the argument and gets a resentful room has still lost. The move is to make the event answer the pressure the team is under — which is also the honest answer to why they wanted to skip it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Events
- What it says
- Failure to operate any events as prescribed results in lost opportunities to inspect and adapt.
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