On a Wednesday in the middle of a Sprint, outside any scheduled Scrum event, a Product Owner and three Developers spend forty minutes on a single large Product Backlog item, ending with it replaced by four smaller items, each with a clearer description and a size. What have they been doing, in the Guide's terms?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility easy
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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 Sprint Planning, since selecting and decomposing work for a Sprint is what Sprint Planning is for
Wrong. Sprint Planning decomposes selected items into a plan for one Sprint and produces a Sprint Goal; nothing here is bound to a Sprint or to a Goal.
Correct Product Backlog refinement — breaking down and further defining items into smaller, more precise items
Correct. That is the Guide's own definition of refinement, and adding detail such as a description, order and size is exactly what it describes the activity as doing.
Not correct Producing the Sprint Backlog, because a decomposed item with a size is what the Sprint Backlog holds
Wrong. The Sprint Backlog is the Sprint Goal, the items selected for this Sprint and the plan for delivering them — it is a plan by and for the Developers, not a state a backlog item reaches.
Not correct Defining the Product Goal, since clarifying what the items mean is how the Goal is expressed
Wrong. The Product Goal is the long-term objective the rest of the backlog emerges to fulfil, not a summary of newly split items.
Why
Refinement is one activity with one purpose: make items small and precise enough that the Developers can be confident about doing them within a Sprint. The detail it adds — description, order, size — is a means to that end, and the attributes themselves vary with the domain. Recognise refinement by what it produces, because the exam will describe the activity without naming it and offer an event as the answer.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Backlog
- What it says
- Product Backlog refinement is the act of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller more precise items.
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