A portfolio analyst extrapolates the team's burn-up and tells the steering group that the remaining ninety backlog items will be finished in exactly eleven Sprints, so the dependent contracts can be signed now. The Scrum Master is asked to comment. What is the soundest thing to say?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility hard
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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
Correct The chart is useful evidence of what has already happened, but in a complex environment what will happen is unknown, so the projection should be re-inspected every Sprint rather than treated as fact
Correct. Forecasting practices are explicitly said not to replace empiricism; they summarise past events, and past events are the only legitimate input to a forward-looking decision.
Not correct The projection is reliable because it is derived from the team's own measured data rather than from opinion
Wrong, and it is the seductive answer. Measured data makes the projection honest about the past; it does not make the future knowable, because the work itself keeps changing what remains.
Not correct The projection is invalid because Scrum does not allow forecasting beyond the current Sprint
Wrong. Scrum forecasts happily across a Product Goal — what it refuses is the pretence of certainty. Banning longer-range forecasting is not the framework's position.
Not correct The Scrum Master should ask the Developers to raise their velocity so the eleven-Sprint figure can be met
Wrong on two counts. It turns a forecast into a target, and it has the Scrum Master directing the Developers' pace, which is neither the accountability nor the way to get honest data.
Why
Empiricism is the mechanism: decisions rest on observation, and the only observations available are of things that have already occurred. A burn-up encodes those observations neatly, which is why it is easy to mistake for a prediction. The line to carry into the exam is that forecasting practices are proven useful and still do not replace empiricism — so a forecast is re-made from fresh evidence each Sprint, never signed as a promise.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section The Sprint
- What it says
- In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making.
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