A programme office asks a Scrum Team to submit a burn-up chart each Sprint and wants to use the trend line to commit externally to a delivery date nine months out. Which TWO statements reflect Scrum's position on forecasting practices like this?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility hard
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The options
Choose 2.
Not correct Burn-downs, burn-ups and cumulative flows are outside Scrum and a team using them is not doing Scrum
Wrong. The Guide names these practices and calls them proven useful; Scrum wraps around existing practices rather than banning them.
Correct Such practices are useful but do not replace the importance of empiricism
Correct. A chart is a projection of the past onto a future the team has not observed yet — useful for a conversation, insufficient as the basis for a promise.
Not correct A trend line drawn from past Sprints is a reliable basis for a fixed nine-month commitment if enough Sprints feed it
Wrong, and it is the most persuasive option because more data really does make a forecast steadier. In complex environments what will happen is unknown, and a steadier line does not make the unknown knowable.
Correct Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making
Correct. This is the empirical constraint the charts sit inside — decisions rest on observed results, which in Scrum means Done Increments rather than projected ones.
Why
Scrum does not forbid measurement; it forbids treating a measurement as evidence of something that has not happened. Forecasting tools are welcome and the Guide names three of them by name, but they describe the shape of past work rather than the value of future work. The habit to carry into the exam is to distrust any option that turns a trend into a guarantee, and to notice that the only thing Scrum offers as real evidence is an Increment that already exists.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section The Sprint
- What it says
- While proven useful, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
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