A programme office asks a Scrum Team to keep the entire Product Backlog — some two hundred items stretching a year out — refined, sized and ready at all times, so that a portfolio plan can be built from it. How should the Scrum Master respond?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct Agree, since the Product Owner is accountable for a transparent Product Backlog and only a fully refined one is transparent
Wrong. Transparency means the backlog honestly shows what is known, including that distant items are still coarse. A uniformly detailed backlog projects false confidence about work nobody has learned enough about yet.
Not correct Agree, but ask for a Sprint of refinement before delivery starts so the backlog can be brought up to that standard
Wrong, and this is the shape teams reach for under exactly this pressure. There is no preparatory Sprint in Scrum that produces no Increment, and refinement is an ongoing activity rather than a phase that completes.
Not correct Agree for the current quarter only, because Scrum requires roughly three Sprints of refined backlog at all times
Wrong. It sounds like a rule and is not one — the Guide names no horizon of Sprints and no percentage of the backlog that must be ready.
Correct Explain that items are refined until they can be Done within one Sprint, which makes them ready for selection, and that the backlog is emergent so distant items stay coarse on purpose
Correct. Readiness in the Guide is a property of individual items measured against one Sprint, not a coverage target across the whole backlog, and detail is bought only where it will soon be used.
Why
Refinement costs the Developers time and its value decays, because an item refined a year early will be refined again after everything learned in between. So Scrum sets the bar per item and near the top: enough precision that it can be Done in a Sprint, which is what makes it a candidate at Sprint Planning. There is no rule about how many Sprints ahead — anyone who quotes one is quoting a practice, not the framework.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Backlog
- What it says
- Product Backlog items that can be Done by the Scrum Team within one Sprint are deemed ready for selection in a Sprint Planning event.
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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- 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
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