As a home-robot company grows to three Scrum Teams — app, firmware, and cloud — a new Scrum Master asks who should attend Sprint Planning for the firmware team's upcoming Sprint. According to the Scrum Guide, who is Sprint Planning for?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Sprint Planning is a whole-team huddle, not a relay race where information gets passed from one group to the next. The Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Developers show up together to shape the Sprint Goal, pick the work, and plan how to do it. Cutting anyone out of that room means the plan is missing a piece it needs.
Full Explanation
Sprint Planning is collaborative work done by the entire Scrum Team - the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Developers together - because each brings something the event needs: the Product Owner discusses the objective the Sprint should achieve and the Product Backlog items that contribute to it, the Developers forecast what they can deliver and plan how, and the Scrum Master ensures the event happens, stays within its timebox, and coaches the team in keeping it useful. Limiting attendance to the Product Owner and Scrum Master removes the very people whose forecast and plan the event exists to produce. Excluding the Product Owner because refinement already happened misunderstands refinement as a substitute for Sprint Planning's value conversation, when refinement only keeps the Product Backlog ready - it doesn't replace deciding this Sprint's goal together. Pulling in representatives from every Scrum Team invents a cross-team planning structure the Guide doesn't describe; each Scrum Team plans its own Sprint, though multiple teams sharing one Product Backlog may coordinate separately on dependencies. Caveat: the Product Owner can be represented by someone empowered to make Product Backlog decisions if the actual Product Owner is genuinely unavailable, but the accountability itself must still be present in substance. Operational check: if a firmware Sprint Planning session runs without anyone able to speak for the Product Backlog's priorities, that's a sign the wrong attendance was set, not that the event can proceed as planned.