A Scrum Team has no tester. Every Sprint its work waits several days in a queue at a central QA department, and items regularly finish after the Sprint has ended. The Scrum Master is considering how to coach the team. What is the most appropriate direction?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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The options
Correct Coach the team and the organisation toward the team holding the skills it needs to create value each Sprint, so testing happens inside the team
Correct. Cross-functionality means the members between them have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint, and a hand-off that outlives the Sprint is the clearest sign that they do not.
Not correct Coach the team to reduce its forecast so that the QA queue fits inside the Sprint
Wrong, and it is the pragmatic-sounding answer. Sizing the Sprint around an external queue accepts the dependency permanently and hides it from the people who could remove it.
Not correct Change the Definition of Done so that items are Done when they leave the Developers for QA
Wrong. Weakening the Definition of Done makes untested work look finished, which is a loss of transparency dressed as progress.
Not correct Ask the Product Owner to negotiate priority in the QA queue each Sprint
Wrong. It may buy this Sprint, and it leaves the team structurally unable to finish its own work — a real activity aimed at a symptom rather than the cause.
Why
Coaching in cross-functionality is one of the Scrum Master's named services, and it is rarely a conversation with the team alone: the skills a team lacks are usually held elsewhere in an organisation that arranged them that way. So the work runs in two directions — helping the Developers grow or acquire the skill, and helping the organisation see why a team that cannot finish its own work cannot produce a Done Increment in a Sprint.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each 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