A line manager asks the Scrum Master for each Developer's individual completed-points figure every Sprint, so it can feed the annual appraisal round. How should the Scrum Master respond?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams easy
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 Supply the figures, since transparency is a Scrum pillar and the data already exists
Wrong, and it borrows a Scrum word to justify the opposite. Transparency in Scrum is about the artefacts and progress toward goals being visible, not about exposing individuals to comparison.
Not correct Supply the figures only with the Developers' consent, since it is their data
Wrong. Consent cannot make a per-person figure into something Scrum produces: the Guide puts accountability for the Increment on the entire Scrum Team and names no individual-output measure anywhere. Handing the figures over with permission still leaves the manager's premise — that Scrum scores people separately — uncorrected, which is the part the Scrum Master is accountable for.
Correct Explain that the Scrum Team is accountable as a unit for a valuable Increment each Sprint, and coach the manager toward measures of delivered value
Correct. Accountability in Scrum sits with the team, so per-person output is not a measure Scrum produces — and coaching the organisation on this is part of serving it.
Not correct Refuse, and ask the Developers to stop estimating so that the figures cannot be produced
Wrong. Destroying the team's own planning information to defeat a reporting request harms the Developers far more than the manager.
Why
Scrum names three accountabilities and none of them is individual throughput. The entire Scrum Team is accountable for a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint, and measuring people separately sets them competing inside a unit whose whole design is collective. Notice what the exam is testing: not that velocity is forbidden, but that Scrum has no individual-performance artefact at all. The Scrum Master's job is to teach the organisation what to look at instead.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint.
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