A programme manager proposes a new Thursday coordination meeting for two Scrum Teams working on the same product, an hour a week, so that dependencies get surfaced. The Scrum Master is asked to book it. What is his best first move?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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 Refuse, because Scrum defines five events and no others may be held
Wrong, and it is the rules-lawyer answer. Scrum minimises the need for other meetings; it does not forbid a team from meeting, and Developers often meet throughout the day.
Not correct Book it and use the time to give the programme manager a status update on both teams
Wrong. That creates a reporting line out of the teams and makes the Scrum Master its channel, which is how a self-managing team learns to wait for someone else to coordinate it.
Not correct Book it inside the Daily Scrum, extending that event to thirty minutes on Thursdays
Wrong, and it is the tempting compromise. The Daily Scrum is a fifteen-minute event for the Developers; stretching it to hold someone else's agenda is how the event stops being theirs.
Correct Ask what the meeting is meant to produce and whether an existing event already serves it, since Scrum's events exist to minimise the need for meetings not defined in Scrum
Correct. Two teams on one product already share a Product Goal, a Product Backlog and a Product Owner, so much of what a coordination meeting would surface has somewhere to be seen. Starting from the need rather than the invitation is what keeps the calendar honest.
Why
Scrum's events create regularity so that ad hoc meetings become unnecessary, which means every proposed new meeting is really a piece of evidence: something an existing event should be handling is not being handled. Sometimes the honest answer is that the teams do need a conversation — Scrum does not ban talking. But a Scrum Master who books it without asking what it is for has added an hour a week and learned nothing.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Events
- What it says
- Events are used in Scrum to create regularity and to minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum.
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