Four short-answer questions testing your understanding of core Scrum concepts. Answer in your own words — do not reproduce course definitions verbatim. Aim for precision and clarity over length.
Your answer should address: what each artifact is, who owns it, how it changes over time, and why confusing the two causes problems for the team.
Go beyond the job title — explain the mindset behind the role, the types of problems the SM handles, and what happens to a team when the SM acts more like a manager.
This question is testing whether you understand the Sprint Goal as a decision-making tool — not just a planning output. Address the specific mechanics of what happens when it is under threat.
For each criterion you choose: state the criteria, write a short example of a story that violates it, explain why it violates it, and rewrite the story to make it compliant.
Three workplace scenarios. For each one, you are in the situation — not observing it. Read carefully, identify what is going wrong, explain why it matters, and propose what you would do. Your reasoning carries more marks than your conclusion.
Your company has been using Scrum for eight months. Sprints are two weeks long. The team runs Sprint Planning every two weeks and produces a Sprint Backlog, but the last four Sprint Retrospectives were cancelled — the development manager said the team was "too busy shipping" to run them. The Daily Scrum happens, but it has gradually become a 35-minute meeting where each developer reports progress to the development manager, who then decides what to work on next. In last week's Sprint Review, three of the five completed stories were rejected by the Product Owner because the acceptance criteria had not been met — but no one had discussed the criteria with the PO during the Sprint. The development manager has now proposed moving to monthly Sprints "to give the team more breathing room."
Your answer should: (a) identify all Scrum failure modes present, (b) explain why each one is causing the specific problems you observe, and (c) propose a concrete recovery plan — not just a list of things to fix, but a prioritised sequence with rationale.
Your team committed to a Sprint Goal of "Allow business clients to export transaction reports in three formats." The Sprint Backlog contains six stories. On day eight, your company's legal team informs you that new financial regulation requires all exported reports to include a mandatory compliance header — a legal requirement that comes into effect in 11 days. Adding this feature is not in the current Sprint Backlog and was not part of the Sprint Goal. It will take approximately three days of development work. The compliance header cannot legally be optional. Your Head of Product is pressuring you to "just add it to this Sprint." Two of the six committed stories are already completed. The developers estimates that adding the compliance work would mean dropping at least two of the remaining four stories.
Your answer should address: (a) what the right Scrum response is to mid-Sprint scope pressure, (b) how you weigh the legal obligation against the Sprint commitment, (c) the specific conversation you would have with the Head of Product, and (d) what the Sprint outcome looks like under your decision.
Sprint Planning starts at 9am with twelve people in the room — the developers (5 people), three business stakeholders, two senior managers, the Product Owner, and yourself. The PO presents the backlog, but when the team asks clarifying questions about acceptance criteria, the PO says "we can sort that out during the Sprint — let's keep moving." By 11am, the team has committed to eleven stories. When you ask about the Sprint Goal, the development manager says "the goal is to finish all eleven items." Three of the eleven stories were added during the Planning meeting itself by one of the senior managers. The meeting ends at 1pm — four hours — with the team visibly exhausted. You notice two developers quietly discussing that they have no idea how to build story number eight.
Your answer should: (a) list every Scrum violation present, (b) rank them by the damage they will cause to the Sprint, (c) explain which one you address first and the specific words you would use to raise it, and (d) describe how a well-run version of this Planning session would have looked.
Two tasks that ask you to produce real Scrum artefacts. You are not describing what you would do — you are doing it. Quality of output and alignment to Scrum principles are both assessed.
FleetTrack is a web application used by operations managers at logistics companies to monitor a fleet of delivery vehicles in real time. The product is early-stage — this is Sprint 1. The operations manager needs to know where each vehicle is, whether it is on schedule, and be alerted when something goes wrong. Drivers use a mobile app to update their status. The backend already exists; you are building the operations manager's dashboard.
The team has agreed on a Sprint Goal: "An operations manager can monitor active deliveries and identify problems without making phone calls."
Write four user stories that serve this Sprint Goal. For each story: use the correct format (As a [user], I want to [action], so that [benefit]), and write at least three acceptance criteria. The four stories together should represent a coherent slice of value — not a random list.
Team Volta is a 5-person product team at a growing e-commerce company: one Product Owner, one Scrum Master, and three developers. They run two-week Sprints. This is their second Sprint. Their current Sprint Goal is: "A customer can track their order from dispatch to delivery without contacting support."
The team is still new to Scrum. They understand the names of the ceremonies but are not yet confident about what each one is really for, how long it should take, or who should be doing what inside it.
For each ceremony: explain its purpose in your own words, describe who runs it and who attends, outline what actually happens step by step, and describe what a successful outcome looks like for this specific team and Sprint Goal. Be practical — write as if you are explaining this to Team Volta before their Sprint begins.
Two reflection questions connecting the frameworks from Sessions 3 and 4 to your own professional context. These questions reward honesty and specificity — generic answers that could apply to any student earn partial marks only.
You do not need to have worked in a Scrum team for this question. The failure modes are about team behaviour patterns — they appear in any kind of project work. Describe the specific behaviours you observed, connect them to the Scrum failure mode, and explain what the consequences were. Then describe what recovery would have looked like.
Draw on what you have learned in all four sessions. Be specific about the context (what kind of team, what kind of work, what kind of organisation). The strongest answers identify an obstacle that is structural or cultural — not just "people don't know Scrum yet" — and propose a response that is realistic given the constraints of that organisation.
Self-Review
This section is not graded and does not affect your score. It is here for you — to help you identify where you feel confident, where you feel uncertain, and what you want to learn more about in the sessions ahead. Your answers will help shape the feedback your lecturer gives you.
Be specific — "everything is fine" is less useful to your lecturer than "I understand what the Scrum Master does in theory but I can't picture how to do it in a real meeting." The more specific you are, the more targeted the feedback you will receive.
This is your chance to influence how the course develops. Sessions 5–10 cover: Requirements & Story Mapping, Estimation & Release Planning, Iterations & Monitoring, Scaling, Leading Teams, Value & Quality. What do you most want to understand by the end of the course?