Professional Scrum Master Scrum Master as Leader 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A Scrum Master is working with three Scrum Teams building the same product. What is the MOST important thing the Scrum Master should coordinate across teams?
- Ensuring each team uses identical Definition of Done and integrated increments each Sprint (Correct answer)
- Standardizing the number of Story Points each team commits to per Sprint
- Making sure all teams use the same set of development tools and IDEs
- Rotating developers between teams each Sprint to share knowledge
Correct answer: Ensuring each team uses identical Definition of Done and integrated increments each Sprint
A shared Definition of Done and integrated increments ensure multiple teams produce a coherent, potentially shippable product.
Question 2: Which of the following BEST describes 'servant leadership' as applied by a Scrum Master?
- The Scrum Master serves the team by shielding them from all organizational requests
- The Scrum Master prioritizes the needs of the team and organization to enable their greatest effectiveness (Correct answer)
- The Scrum Master performs administrative tasks so developers can focus exclusively on coding
- The Scrum Master reports directly to the Development Team rather than to management
Correct answer: The Scrum Master prioritizes the needs of the team and organization to enable their greatest effectiveness
Servant leadership means enabling others' effectiveness by removing obstacles, facilitating growth, and supporting both team and organizational needs.
Question 3: The organization mandates a new security compliance process that adds three days to every Sprint. How should the Scrum Master handle this?
- Ignore the mandate since external processes cannot override Scrum principles
- Work with the team to integrate the compliance steps into their Definition of Done (Correct answer)
- Ask management to extend the Sprint length to 5 weeks to accommodate compliance
- Remove security compliance from Sprint scope and handle it in a separate non-Scrum workflow
Correct answer: Work with the team to integrate the compliance steps into their Definition of Done
Incorporating compliance requirements into the Definition of Done makes quality and regulatory standards a transparent, built-in part of done work.
Question 4: A Scrum Master is asked to assign tasks to developers each Sprint. What should the Scrum Master do?
- Assign tasks based on each developer's performance history to optimize throughput
- Decline and encourage the Development Team to self-organize and pull work based on the Sprint Goal (Correct answer)
- Create a task board and fill it before Sprint Planning so the team can review assignments
- Assign tasks during Sprint Planning and adjust them daily based on progress
Correct answer: Decline and encourage the Development Team to self-organize and pull work based on the Sprint Goal
Scrum teams self-organize to determine how work is done; assigning tasks undermines this core principle.
Question 5: A developer tells the Scrum Master privately that the team's estimate process feels coercive—senior developers dominate and others just agree. What should the Scrum Master do?
- Keep the information confidential and take no action to protect the developer's trust
- Introduce estimation techniques such as Planning Poker that surface independent estimates before discussion (Correct answer)
- Report the senior developers' behavior to HR
- Replace group estimation with individual estimates submitted in writing
Correct answer: Introduce estimation techniques such as Planning Poker that surface independent estimates before discussion
Techniques like Planning Poker reveal independent estimates simultaneously, reducing anchoring and peer pressure during estimation.
Question 6: Which outcome BEST signals that a Scrum Master has successfully coached an organization toward agility?
- All teams complete Sprints on time without any scope changes
- Teams continuously inspect and adapt both their product and their processes without Scrum Master prompting (Correct answer)
- The organization has adopted all optional Scrum practices such as Kanban and SAFe
- Management has stopped attending Sprint Reviews since the product is stable
Correct answer: Teams continuously inspect and adapt both their product and their processes without Scrum Master prompting
Self-sustaining inspection and adaptation without external prompting is the hallmark of an organization that has internalized agility.
Question 7: A Scrum Master observes that the organization's culture rewards individual heroics and overtime over sustainable pace. What is the MOST impactful long-term action?
- Work with leadership to shift incentive structures and recognition toward team outcomes and sustainable delivery (Correct answer)
- Advise the team to work overtime voluntarily to meet expectations while Scrum is being adopted
- Document the cultural misalignment and submit a formal complaint to HR
- Ask the Product Owner to reduce the backlog so the team never needs to work overtime
Correct answer: Work with leadership to shift incentive structures and recognition toward team outcomes and sustainable delivery
Changing incentive structures at the leadership level is the only intervention that durably shifts organizational culture.
Professional Scrum Master Scrum Master as Leader 4
A Scrum Master is working with three Scrum Teams building the same product.
What is the MOST important thing the Scrum Master should coordinate across teams?