The support desk keeps a separate defect queue and sends urgent tickets straight to two Developers, who work them alongside the Sprint. The Product Owner sees none of this and cannot explain to stakeholders why forecasts keep slipping. What does Scrum say about the arrangement?
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 It is acceptable, because defects are unplanned work and Scrum only governs planned product work
Wrong. Scrum draws no such line — work is work, and a category of it kept outside the backlog is exactly what destroys the team's ability to forecast.
Not correct It is acceptable if the Developers keep the tickets under a fixed share of their capacity each Sprint
Wrong, and it is the compromise most organisations actually reach. A capacity allocation makes the hidden work predictable in volume but still invisible in content, so the Product Owner still cannot order it against everything else.
Not correct It is acceptable provided the Scrum Master reports the ticket effort at the Sprint Review
Wrong. Reporting the work after the fact does not restore the Product Owner's ability to decide it should have been done at all, and no such reporting duty exists.
Correct It is not acceptable — the Product Backlog is the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team, so the tickets belong in it and in the Product Owner's ordering
Correct. One list is what makes the ordering meaningful and the Sprint forecastable, and urgency is an argument for a high position in that list rather than for a second list.
Why
The phrase to memorise is single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team. A second queue does not just bypass the Product Owner; it makes every Sprint forecast wrong by an unknown amount and hides the trade-off being made. Note what the rule does not say: it does not say defects need estimates or a special item type, only that they compete for position in one ordered list like everything else.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Backlog
- What it says
- It is the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team.
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