Ahead of a refinement session, the Product Owner arrives with sizes already written against nine Product Backlog items, explaining that they sized them from last quarter's similar work to save the Developers an hour. Who is responsible for the sizing of Product Backlog items?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility easy
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, since sizing feeds directly into ordering by value and cost
Wrong. Cost information genuinely does inform ordering, which is why this feels right, but the Product Owner consumes the size rather than producing it.
Not correct The Scrum Master, who facilitates estimation and keeps it consistent across Sprints
Wrong. A Scrum Master may help a team find a technique that works, but they hold no estimate of their own and do not standardise numbers on the team's behalf.
Not correct The Scrum Team as a whole, by consensus across all three accountabilities
Wrong. Several things in Scrum are the whole team's — the Sprint Planning result, the Definition of Done in the absence of organisational standards — but sizing is named more narrowly than that.
Correct The Developers who will be doing the work
Correct. The Guide assigns sizing to exactly the people who will carry it out, because only they can judge what the work costs them with their skills, their code and their Definition of Done.
Why
Sizing is a forecast about the effort of doing something, so it belongs to the people who will do it — a size produced by anyone else is a wish. That does not shut the Product Owner out: they may influence the Developers by helping them understand and select trade-offs, which is a conversation about scope and options, not a number handed over. Pre-filled sizes on the way into refinement are the classic wrong answer.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Backlog
- What it says
- The Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing.
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
- A portfolio manager has drawn up a spreadsheet ranking every requested feature by projected revenue and tells the Scrum Team to build them in that order. The Product Owner believes two of the top five items will not be used by the customers she has spoken to. Who is accountable for maximising the value of the product? machine-checked
- It is the last afternoon of the Sprint. Three of the eight selected items are coded and demonstrable on a laptop, but they have not been through the automated regression suite the Definition of Done requires. The Product Owner suggests showing them at tomorrow's Sprint Review anyway, marked as "pending test". What does Scrum say? machine-checked
- A new Scrum Master is asked by a director where in Scrum the organisation gets to see whether the last four weeks of work were worth anything, and what should change as a result. Which event is she describing? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team spent a Sprint building a bulk-import feature. It meets the Definition of Done, it is usable, and it was released on day nine. At the Sprint Review the stakeholders explain that since the Sprint began their largest customer has moved to a different data format, and nobody will use the feature. What does Scrum say about this Sprint, and what happens now? machine-checked
- A delivery manager introduces a quarterly target: every Scrum Team must raise its velocity by fifteen per cent, and team performance reviews will cite the number. Within two Sprints the team's story point totals have risen and no more working software is reaching users than before. What is the most accurate statement about this measure? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is agreeing what it will actually put in front of stakeholders at the end of each Sprint. Which TWO of the following statements about the Increment are true in Scrum? machine-checked