People are often curious to know the style and format of questions in the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master III (PSM III) assessment. Here is an example of the sort of things to expect:
You are a Scrum Master working with a Scrum Team. The Developers constantly complain that requirements are not clear enough. The Product Owner claims she is too busy to provide extra clarity. What should you do?
If you would like to see more questions, check out our Ultimate Scrum Master III (PSM III) Practice Questions and our Ultimate Professional Scrum Master III (PSM III) Practice Assessment.
Please feel free to post your answers in the comments section below and I will be happy to review and provide feedback.
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As the scrum Master, I would:
1. Teach the PO on Product backlog, its essence and components. Teach that spending enough time with development is a very important part of this job.
2. Coach the team on problem solving and promote them to address the issue/overcome methods in Sprint planning and subsequent meetings by putting forth powerful questions
3. Facilitate the sprint planning meeting and ensure that the cohesion btw PO and development is created and they work towards one goal (Importance on the Conversation and Confirmation ( 2 of the 3C’s ) of user stories are understood by the PO and team
4. If required and team feels , I would facilitate – Product backlog refinement in initial days
I see two things in the context
1. Requirements are not clear enough
2. PO is too busy to provide the clarity
I would suggest the team to raise this during the retrospective if it is not yet brought
1. As a SM I would try to understand what the team is expecting in terms of Clarity of the requirement s and facilitate a conversation to define the criteria for the requirements to be clear.
2. As a SM I would try to understand from PO what is making her so busy and try to coach her about the role of a PO and the Scrum value ‘commitment’.
As a scrum master, I will see the product owner to clarify her role. Her mission is to maximize the value of the product that is the result of the dev. team work. That includes clarifying the product backlog items. I will then discuss with her her daily work and what makes her that busy. Then, I will help her working on product backlog items, and sensibilize her on the importance of the refinement.
I will participate to the refinement to be sur that the team asks the good questions, and explain that it’s an occasion for the scrum team to add more details to the product items.I can explain to the product owner that she has the possibility to ask the team to help her detailling the product backlog items, but that she is still accountable on it.
Coach the PO to help her understand the importance of her role for the DEV team her important regarding the business. I would try to help her find effective product backlog management techniques and ensure that she knows how to arrange it to maximize value. I will try to make her understand the need for clear requirements as it would provide transparency to the DEV team regarding what is expected from them. I would also have a conversation with her manager regarding the scrum adoption, to make him/her see the importance of the PO role and help to share the extra load with a colleague to give the PO more time to focus on her role. I would also have a conversation with the DEV team to try to understand what is not clear and see how they can, as a self organize group, find ways to mitigate that from what they already know (empirism)
Raise as an impediment on Retrospective Meeting, Teach Product Owner on his responsibility of PB Management which includes ensuring the Dev Team understand items in PB to the level needed, facilitate Backlog Refinement activity.
I would coach the team that the Sprint Retrospective is a good event for inspecting the process of the sprint. If they think that the unclear requirements is a recurring issue, we should discuss that openly in the Sprint Retrospective with the Product Owner, who’s part of the event. And hopefully the team can come up with some improvement items that the whole Scrum team can work on in the next sprint. That’s the spirit of the Empiricism that we inspect and adapt.
The Scrum Master should also point out that according to the Scrum Guide, the Product Owner is responsible for clearly expressing Product Backlog items. The Product Owner may do the work himself/herself, or have the Development Team do it. It’s just the Product Owner remains accountable.
In the Sprint Retrospective, as a Scrum Master I would hope the development team to figure out possible improvement items with the Product Owner without my intervention. But in case the conversation does not well, I would help by asking the following questions
– What would happen if the Development team are not clear about the requirements details and make their own assumption? What if the assumption are wrong? Would it be ok or too late that we’ve found out the wrong assumptions at the Sprint Review?
– Are there any other way that we can inspect and adapt the product backlog items without the Product Owner explicitly listing all the requirements? Could it be the development team help figuring out the unclear part and ask Product Owner?
– If the development team has to make assumption? Are there any way that we can help them to make better assumption? Would it help if they have a better understanding on the product vision, strategy and road map?
Depends on how the conversations go, the Scrum Master may ask other questions. But hope that will help the team to agree on some items, if appropriate, that they can adapt the process and try in the coming sprint. We could inspect the result and see whether we need further adaptation in the next Sprint Retrospective.
Two things stand out to me from this context.
Firstly, Quality is at risk due to “constant complaints” of unclear requirements and the PO is not investing time to the dev team for this. We have a definition of ready (DoR) to act as a quality gateway for backlog items going into sprints. I would encourage the team to be more disciplined with this and not accept any items unless the DoR is met (remembering that the PO is also involved in agreeing the DoR). Rejecting backlog items may initially not go down so well with the PO and others but it will show the importance of investing time to ensure quality increments are developed for their product.
Secondly, it may be a case that the PO doesn’t fully understand their role and responsibilities to the team. I would talk with the PO about these and see what is taking him/her away from them. Perhaps they need to prioritise their workload better, perhaps they need to hire someone else to take on their other responsibilities, or perhaps they need to delegate the PO role to someone else who can fulfil the role.
Just saw this…I took my PSM1 today and I swear I saw a question almost identical to this…
On top of the above about working with the P.O. on their time and responsibilities. I would revisit the definition of ready with the whole team Inc the p.o to make sure we are all on the same page. I’d also suggest a shift left approach that the p.o adds the bulk to the stories but the whole team works together (3 amigos) to make sure the stories have enough information in them to start refining them. Yes it would reduce valocity because the team would be working on this but it would get the team closer to delivering value giving them a wider perspective of what is coming up and boaught into the product more
Product Backlog Grooming needs to be planned in every Iteration to get the prioritization and details sorted for the team to pull the stories from Backlog during Sprint Planning, this would allow the team to do the Sprint incase the PO is not 100% available, also the PO needs to be coached that one of the principles of Agile is Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Interesting! Because what I’ve learned from Mike Cohn is that teams tend to always find more detail. More detail=more certainly. Or so you would think. But more certainly does not mean more creativity. I would ask this team: do you know what problem you are trying to solve? And what information is required to work on the solution?
Bashing the P.O. is too easy. But it would help having the P.O. there as well having this conversation
I already passed the PSMIII, so I do hope I’m right
I would identify with the Product Owner what other things are keeping her too busy to clarify the requirements. During that discussion I would identify those things that the PO is doing that are not her’s to do and get those responsibilities moved to the appropriate people.
I would remind the Product Owner that the goal of the Team is to deliver value in the product to her and that they will do that better when she is available to provide clarity and remove ambiguity that is affecting the Scrum Team.