On day seven of a two-week Sprint a major customer threatens to escalate unless a new regulatory report ships this Sprint. The Product Owner agrees it matters. The Developers say that taking it on means the Sprint Goal will not be met. What does Scrum permit?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility hard
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 The Product Owner may add it, since the Product Owner decides what the Scrum Team works on
Wrong. The Product Owner owns the Product Backlog and its ordering; the Sprint Backlog belongs to the Developers, and during the Sprint no change may be made that would endanger the Sprint Goal.
Not correct The Developers must drop selected items of roughly equal size and take the report in, so the Sprint's total load is unchanged
Wrong, and it is the swap that sounds fairest — equal size feels like a neutral trade. But the test during a Sprint is the Sprint Goal, not the volume of work, and dropping the items that carried the Goal in exchange for one that does not is precisely the change the rule forbids.
Not correct The Scrum Master decides, weighing the customer's escalation against the team's ability to deliver
Wrong. This is not the Scrum Master's decision at any point. They may help the room see the options honestly, including what cancelling would mean, but they do not adjudicate scope.
Correct Scope may be clarified and renegotiated with the Product Owner as more is learned, but not in a way that endangers the Sprint Goal
Correct. It names the ordinary route and the boundary that stops it: if the report truly costs the Goal it belongs in the Product Backlog. There is one genuine exit — should the Sprint Goal itself become obsolete, only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint.
Why
The Sprint Goal is what a stakeholder's urgency runs into, and it is deliberately hard to move. Scope inside a Sprint is negotiable with the Product Owner all the way through — that is how a team responds to what it learns — but the Goal is the boundary that negotiation stops at. There is exactly one escape hatch: if a change has made the Sprint Goal obsolete rather than merely inconvenient, the Product Owner, and only the Product Owner, may cancel the Sprint.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section The Sprint
- What it says
- No changes are made that would endanger the Sprint Goal
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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