Experience can work against you on a Scrum Master assessment. Your team runs Scrum a certain way, and the questions are written against the 2020 Scrum Guide, which is shorter and stricter than most teams. I wrote 200 practice questions using nothing but that guide, and these are the habits that cost points over and over.
Every quote below is from The 2020 Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, offered under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license.
1. The Daily Scrum belongs to the Developers
Many teams have the Scrum Master or a manager run the stand-up. The guide is plain about whose event it is.
"The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team."
The Product Owner and Scrum Master take part as Developers only when they actually work on Sprint Backlog items. And the format is up to the Developers, as long as it inspects progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces a plan for the next day.
2. There is no Development Team anymore
The 2020 guide talks about one Scrum Team made of one Scrum Master, one Product Owner and Developers.
"Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-teams or hierarchies."
An option that says "the Development Team decides" is written in 2017 vocabulary. It is often the distractor.
3. Each artifact has a commitment, and you need all three
Commitments are one of the additions of the 2020 version.
"For the Product Backlog it is the Product Goal. For the Sprint Backlog it is the Sprint Goal. For the Increment it is the Definition of Done."
If a question asks what gives the Product Backlog its direction, the answer is the Product Goal, not the roadmap or the release plan.
4. Velocity and story points are not in the guide
Search the 2020 guide for velocity, story points or user stories and you will not find them. They may be good practices, but an answer that makes them mandatory is wrong by the guide. Burn-down charts are a special case, the guide does mention them, as one forecasting practice among several.
"Various practices exist to forecast progress, like burn-downs, burn-ups, or cumulative flows. While proven useful, these do not replace the importance of empiricism."
5. Refinement is an activity, not an event
There are five events, the Sprint, Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective. Refinement is not one of them.
"This is an ongoing activity to add details, such as a description, order, and size."
So an option that schedules a "refinement event" with a timebox is not Scrum as the guide defines it.
6. The Sprint Review is not a release gate
Teams that release once a Sprint often assume the Review is where the release gets approved.
"The Sprint Review should never be considered a gate to releasing value."
An Increment can go to stakeholders before the end of the Sprint.
7. Know the timeboxes for a one-month Sprint
Sprint Planning is a maximum of eight hours, the Sprint Review four hours, the Sprint Retrospective three hours, and the Daily Scrum 15 minutes. For shorter Sprints the guide says the events are usually shorter, without giving a formula.
8. Only the Product Owner can cancel a Sprint
"Only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint."
Not the Scrum Master, not the Developers, not a stakeholder, even a senior one.
How to use this
Read the 2020 guide once, slowly. It is short. Then, when a practice question tempts you with something your team does, ask whether the guide says it. If it does not, it is probably the trap.
Practice
I put 30 questions online for free, six from each part of the guide, no signup. Each answer shows the sentence of the Scrum Guide that settles it.
30 free Scrum practice questions
They come from a set of 200, four tests and a drill. It is a PDF on Ko-fi for 9 euros, or the same questions as a Udemy practice test course at 12.99 dollars with that link until November 4. If you think one of my answers reads the guide wrongly, tell me in the comments.
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