With a large launch two weeks away, the Developers propose skipping the Sprint Retrospective for the next two Sprints — "we know what is wrong, we just have no time to talk about it". The Product Owner agrees. What should the Scrum Master do?
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 Agree, because a self-managing team may decide how it works
Wrong, and it is the strongest distractor because it invokes a genuine Scrum principle. Self-management governs how the team does its work inside the framework; it does not extend to deleting a part of the framework.
Not correct Hold the Retrospective anyway and run it himself while the Developers keep working
Wrong. An event the team is not in is not the event; the Retrospective is the Scrum Team inspecting itself, and one person cannot do it on their behalf.
Correct Ensure the Retrospective still takes place, and use the pressure the team is under as its subject so the event is demonstrably productive
Correct. The Scrum Master ensures all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive and within the timebox — and a team too busy to improve is precisely the team that needs the event.
Not correct Replace it with an anonymous survey for the two Sprints so no meeting time is lost
Wrong. A survey collects opinions but produces no shared inspection and no agreed improvement for the next Sprint, which is what the event is for.
Why
Events are where inspection and adaptation actually happen, so skipping one is a lost opportunity to adapt, not a saved hour. The Scrum Master's accountability here is specific — the events take place, are positive and productive, and stay within the timebox — and the second half matters as much as the first. If a team wants to drop an event, the useful question is what makes it feel worthless, and that question is itself Retrospective material.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.
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