During refinement a Developer turns to the Scrum Master and asks, "How should we break this item down?" The Scrum Master has split items like it many times and could answer in a sentence. What is the coaching response?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams easy
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The options
Not correct Give the split, because the Scrum Master's experience is exactly what the team is short of
Wrong, and it is the seductive one — it is faster, it is probably right, and it teaches the Developers to bring the next decomposition question to the Scrum Master too.
Correct Ask questions that help the Developers find a split themselves, offering options and their trade-offs rather than the answer
Correct. Coaching in self-management means growing the team's ability to make the decision, so the Scrum Master supplies technique and questions while the choice stays with the Developers.
Not correct Refer the question to the Product Owner, since he wrote the item
Wrong. How work is decomposed into an Increment is at the sole discretion of the Developers; the Product Owner clarifies what is wanted, not how it is cut up.
Not correct Decline to engage, because a Scrum Master must never influence how the Developers work
Wrong, and it is the over-correction. A Scrum Master who withholds help is not neutral, he is simply not serving; teaching and advising are explicit parts of the accountability.
Why
The line between teaching and telling is who is left holding the decision. Answering makes the Scrum Master a permanent source of answers; teaching leaves the team with a method they can use when he is not in the room. That does not mean silence — offering two ways to split an item and asking which fits the Sprint Goal is coaching. It stops being coaching the moment the Scrum Master's preference decides how the Developers work.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality;
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