A Scrum Master facilitates the Daily Scrum every morning, going round the three questions and noting blockers. The Developers have grown quiet and now speak to her rather than to each other. She is not working on any Sprint Backlog item. What should she change?
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 Keep facilitating but stop taking notes, so the event feels less like a report
Wrong. The notebook is not the problem; the Developers still address the person running the event, and the plan is still being produced for her benefit.
Not correct Ask the Product Owner to facilitate instead, to break the pattern
Wrong. Swapping one outside chair for another leaves the Developers still reporting to somebody, and it drags the Product Owner into an event that exists for the Developers' re-planning.
Not correct Attend as a participant and give her own update each day alongside the Developers
Wrong. She would participate as a Developer only if she were actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, which she is not — and here it would deepen the very habit she needs to break.
Correct Hand the Daily Scrum to the Developers, who choose their own structure and techniques, and coach on how it is working rather than chairing it
Correct. The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers, who select whatever structure and techniques they want; her accountability is that it happens and is productive, not that she chairs it.
Why
The Daily Scrum belongs to the Developers: they choose the structure, and the output is an actionable plan for the next day that they can act on. A Scrum Master who chairs it turns re-planning into reporting, which is why the tell-tale symptom is people talking to the facilitator instead of each other. She teaches the event, ensures it is timeboxed and useful, and stops running it — taking part as a Developer only when she is genuinely working on items in the Sprint Backlog.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Daily Scrum
- What it says
- If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers.
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