A home-robot company's Scrum Master tells the app Developers exactly which tickets to pick up each morning and in what order, believing this keeps the team efficient. Which Scrum value does this most clearly violate?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Handing out the day's tickets might feel efficient, but it treats the Developers like they need direction rather than trust. Respect is the value at stake — it means treating each other as capable, independent people, and deciding who does what and how is exactly the Developers' own call to make, not the Scrum Master's.
Full Explanation
The Scrum Guide names Respect as one of the five Scrum values: Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people. That respect underlies the Developers' self-management — deciding who does what, when, and how within the Sprint — and a Scrum Master dictating the day's task order overrides exactly that autonomy, treating capable engineers as if they need to be told what to do rather than trusted to organize their own work. This is also a direct scope-wall violation: the Scrum Guide is explicit that the Scrum Master does not assign tasks to the Developers. Openness is about disclosing work and challenges honestly, which isn't what's at issue here — the Scrum Master's directive isn't concealing information, it's overstepping authority. Focus concerns keeping attention on the Sprint Goal, and assigning tasks doesn't inherently distract from that goal — it can even look efficient on the surface, which is what makes this scenario a Respect problem rather than a Focus one. Commitment is about personally committing to achieving goals, which isn't removed by being told which ticket to pick up first; the harm here is to autonomy, not to the team's ability to commit. A concrete check: watch who decides the day's task order — if it's consistently the Scrum Master rather than the Developers themselves, that's a Respect and self-management problem to raise directly.