Before a new product's first Sprint Review, a governance lead asks the Scrum Master to circulate an acceptance sheet so attending stakeholders can formally sign the Increment off, and asks that stakeholder questions be held until the last ten minutes so the walkthrough runs cleanly. How should the Scrum Master respond?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility 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 to both — a signed record is a reasonable organisational addition as long as the event's timebox is respected
Wrong. Scrum contains no acceptance or sign-off step anywhere, and a signature converts an inspection into an approval gate that the Increment does not need.
Not correct Agree to the acceptance sheet, since governance needs a record, but push back on holding the questions
Wrong, and it is the tempting compromise because half of it is right. The questions do belong throughout, but conceding the sign-off concedes the more damaging half: a Sprint Review that ends in approval stops being about what to do next.
Not correct Refuse both and run the event as a clean demonstration of every finished item instead
Wrong. That is the other failure mode of this event. A demonstration with no collaboration produces applause and an unchanged Product Backlog.
Correct Explain that the Sprint Review is a working session, not a presentation — the stakeholders' questions are the event, and there is nothing to sign
Correct. The event is where the Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished and what has changed in their environment, and then collaborate on what to do next. Both requests push that toward a broadcast with a signature at the end, and both misread what the Sprint Review is for.
Why
Ask what the Sprint Review produces. Not a decision that the work is acceptable — the Definition of Done already settled that — but a shared answer to what the product should do next, drawn from the Increment and from what changed in the environment while the Sprint ran. Anything that reduces the stakeholders' talking time reduces the only output the event has. The test to carry into the exam room: if nothing about the plan could move, it was not a Sprint Review.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Sprint Review
- What it says
- The Sprint Review is a working session and the Scrum Team should avoid limiting it to a presentation.
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
More questions on this objective
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