Halfway through Sprint Planning the Product Owner says she needs eleven items this Sprint to hit a date she has given a customer, and asks the Developers to take all eleven. The Developers believe seven is realistic. Who decides how much goes into the Sprint Backlog?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct The Product Owner, because she is accountable for maximising value and therefore for what the Sprint delivers
Wrong, and it is the trap here. The Product Owner decides what is most valuable and in what order it should be considered — she does not decide how much of it fits in one Sprint.
Not correct The Scrum Master, who resolves the disagreement by setting a number both sides can live with
Wrong. A Scrum Master coaches and facilitates the conversation; deciding the Sprint's scope on the team's behalf would remove the self-management the accountability exists to protect.
Correct The Developers, who select the items from the Product Backlog through discussion with the Product Owner
Correct. Selection is a judgement about what can be Done, and the people who will do the work make it — in conversation with the Product Owner, whose ordering and trade-offs shape which items are on the table.
Not correct The whole Scrum Team by majority vote, since Sprint Planning is a collaborative event
Wrong. Sprint Planning is collaborative, but collaboration is not a vote, and Scrum places the sizing and selection judgement with the Developers rather than with a show of hands.
Why
Forecasting capacity and ordering value are two different decisions held by two different accountabilities. The Product Owner shapes the queue and explains the trade-offs; the Developers say how much of that queue they can turn into a Done Increment. A date pressure does not move the boundary — it is an input to the conversation. If an exam stem has someone outside the Developers setting the Sprint's volume of work, that is the wrong answer.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Topic Two: What can be Done this Sprint?
- What it says
- Through discussion with the Product Owner, the Developers select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint.
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