During one Sprint the Developers finish and deploy four separate pieces of work, each meeting the Definition of Done. A tester asks whether this means the team has produced four Increments or has broken the rule of one Increment per Sprint. What is correct?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility easy
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.
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The options
Not correct There is one Increment per Sprint by definition, so the four pieces only become an Increment at the Sprint Review
Wrong, and it is the most common misreading. An Increment is born the moment an item meets the Definition of Done; the Review is where the sum of them is presented, not where they come into existence.
Not correct Four Increments is a rule violation, and the Developers should batch their work into a single release per Sprint
Wrong. Batching delays value for no benefit Scrum recognises, and nothing in the framework requires one release per Sprint.
Correct Multiple Increments may be created within a Sprint, so the team has produced four, and their sum is presented at the Sprint Review
Correct. Each Increment is additive to all prior Increments and thoroughly verified, and the Sprint Review looks at what they add up to.
Not correct They count as one Increment only because all four were deployed; undeployed work would count separately
Wrong. Deployment is not what defines an Increment — meeting the Definition of Done is. Whether and when Done work is then deployed is a separate question about value, and it changes nothing about how many Increments exist.
Why
An Increment is a concrete stepping stone toward the Product Goal, created whenever work meets the Definition of Done — which can happen many times in a Sprint. The Sprint Review then inspects their sum. This is what makes continuous delivery entirely compatible with Scrum: the framework counts Done work, not release events, and it never caps how much of it a Sprint may produce.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Increment
- What it says
- Multiple Increments may be created within a 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
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