A newer Product Owner asks the Scrum Master which specific estimation technique Scrum requires the team to use to forecast how much Product Backlog remains for the next retail cycle. How should the Scrum Master respond?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
There's no official Scrum ruler for measuring how much work is left. Whatever method helps the team turn real, completed Sprints into an honest look-ahead is fair game, since the Guide cares that the forecast is grounded in evidence, not which formula produced it.
Full Explanation
The mechanism is that the Scrum Guide deliberately leaves estimation and forecasting technique unspecified, trusting empirical data from actually completed work to inform whatever approach the team finds useful, whether that's counting items, tracking a trend, or something else entirely. The velocity-as-required distractor and the standardized-point-scale distractor both invent a mandated tool the Guide never names, treating a common industry habit as if it were a rule; conflating a widely used practice with a Scrum requirement is one of the most common misreadings of the framework. The Scrum-Master-selects-the-method distractor also misassigns authority, since forecasting approach isn't dictated top-down by one accountability, and the Scrum Master's role here is coaching and clarifying, not choosing tools for the team. Caveat: this doesn't mean forecasting is arbitrary; it still has to be grounded in real completed work, not guesswork dressed up as a technique. Operational check: whatever method the team lands on, verify it's actually built from Sprints they've completed, not from an estimate made before any real Sprint happened.