A regulatory-compliance specialist who is not a Developer on the Scrum Team joins the Daily Scrum most days to ask detailed certification questions, regularly extending the event well past 15 minutes. What should the Scrum Master do?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Certification questions matter, they just don't belong inside a 15-minute planning huddle that's supposed to stay short and sharp. The fix isn't shutting the door on the specialist or blowing up the timebox — it's moving the deep-dive conversation to its own slot right after.
Full Explanation
The Daily Scrum has a fixed 15-minute timebox for the Developers to plan their next 24 hours, and the Scrum Master's role is to coach the event back toward that purpose without shutting out a legitimate stakeholder relationship — separating detailed discussion into its own follow-up conversation does exactly that. Banning the specialist entirely overcorrects and could cut off a useful information flow the team genuinely needs for certification-gated work. Letting the pattern continue unaddressed sacrifices the event's timebox and focus for a topic that has a better home elsewhere, and it sets a precedent that any interested party can extend the Daily Scrum indefinitely. Permanently extending the timebox treats a facilitation problem as if it were a Guide requirement to change, when the actual fix is separating concerns rather than inflating the event to absorb everything. A useful check: after coaching the split, see whether the Daily Scrum consistently lands near 15 minutes again while certification questions still get answered promptly in their own space.