Understanding and Applying the Scrum Framework

PSPO II · 45 questions

• A public-health lab-results integration is still unknown: vendors, data quality, and privacy constraints are unproven, yet the steering committee wants the Product Owner to present a certain delivery date. Which Scrum Value should guide the Product Owner?
• At Sprint Review for the city parks pass, evidence shows residents abandon the mayor’s favorite gated “VIP picnic locker” flow. What should the Product Owner do?
• Planning commissioners ask the building-permits Product Owner to hide politically sensitive items from the Product Backlog so inspection stays “quiet.” What should the Product Owner do?
• The transit real-time-arrivals Product Owner wants more items in the Sprint than Developers forecast they can complete to Done. How should respect show up?
• Mid-Sprint, the health director dumps three extra outbreak-dashboard widgets onto the public-health Scrum Team. The Sprint Goal is a working exposure map for school nurses. What should the Product Owner do?
• Finance wants the city water-quality alerts Product Owner to commit to a fixed date, fixed scope, and fixed budget for the whole Product Goal. What is a valid Product Owner commitment?
• After Sprint Review, 311 request-status metrics show residents still cannot tell when a pothole will be filled. The Product Owner publishes a metrics PDF and leaves the Product Backlog unchanged. What is missing, and what should happen?
• A council aide rewards departments that quietly lobby for their own building-permit fee-waiver features off the record. How should the Product Owner model Scrum Values under that pressure?
• Developers on the parks irrigation-scheduling product ask the Product Owner to write every technical task for the Sprint. What should the Product Owner clarify?
• The Scrum Master of the building-permits portal reorders Product Backlog items to “balance department fairness.” What should the Product Owner do?
• The transit operations manager assigns individual Developers tasks during the Sprint for the fare-capping product. How should the Product Owner support Scrum Team accountability?
• Leadership asks the Product Owner of a large, politically conflicted public-health case-investigation product to also serve full-time as Scrum Master. What should the Product Owner surface?
• Mid-Sprint, emergency legislation cancels the housing-voucher program the current Sprint Goal depends on. A director tells the Scrum Master to cancel the Sprint. Who may cancel it, and why?
• Parks, Public Works, and the mayor’s office each want their own Product Owner with a vote on one parks-reservation product. What should be reinforced?
• A GIS license stall is blocking the building-permits Scrum Team. The Product Owner can unblock the vendor; the Scrum Master is facilitating impediment removal. How should they collaborate?
• Mid-Sprint, a health officer wants a new vaccine-inventory report added. Developers refuse because it would force an Increment that fails the Definition of Done. What should the Product Owner do?
• Sprint Planning is starting for the transit trip-planner. What is the Product Owner’s job in that event?
• The building-inspections Product Owner starts running Daily Scrum as a personal status meeting, asking each Developer to report to them. What should change?
• The parks splash-pad booking Product Owner is planning Sprint Review. What should that event accomplish?
• After a tense Sprint on the 311 request portal, stakeholders tell the Product Owner to skip Sprint Retrospective and “let the team vent without product talk.” What should the Product Owner do?
• A county public-health clinic portal is behind on a flu-shot booking Increment. The health director wants to cancel this Sprint Review so Developers get two more hours of coding. What should the Product Owner do?
• Sprint Planning for a city building-permit portal starts, and the top of the Product Backlog is still an unrefined pile of department wishes. Developers cannot forecast a coherent Sprint. What accountability did the Product Owner miss?
• At the Sprint Review for a transit-app real-time arrivals Increment, a facilitator starts a slide tour of every new screen. Riders and operations supervisors are in the room. How should the Product Owner steer the conversation?
• A parks recreation-booking Product Owner wants to keep Sprint Planning open until every field-trip rule is specified, and the timebox is already exhausted. What should the Product Owner do?
• During the Sprint Review for a utilities billing portal, neighborhood leaders show that a late-fee waiver flow matters more than the next planned paperless-bill theme. What should the Product Owner do next?
• A library digital-card Product Backlog has become a junk drawer of branch wishes, vendor tickets, and one-off reports, and there is no Product Goal. What should the Product Owner establish first?
• Sprint Planning for an emergency-alert product produces a scattered task list—banner colors, a vendor patch, and an unused CSV export—with no Sprint Goal. What should the Product Owner do?
• On a county vaccine-registry product, Developers mark items Done when the code is committed, even though clinic staff cannot use the Increment and required privacy checks are skipped. What should the Product Owner insist on?
• Two Scrum Teams share one city permitting product. One team treats accessibility and records-retention checks as Done; the other ships coded screens without them. What should the Product Owner support?
• A public-works inspection-app team finishes a half-built offline-sync module that inspectors cannot use and that does not add to the previous Increment. Leadership wants it shown as this Sprint's Increment. What should the Product Owner do?
• A municipal open-data portal Product Owner keeps the real Product Backlog in a hidden personal spreadsheet while the team board shows only this Sprint's tasks. Stakeholders cannot see upcoming order. What should the Product Owner do?
• Mid-Sprint on a school-enrollment product, the Product Owner starts rewriting Developer tasks on the Sprint Backlog and assigning who will build each validation rule. What should the Product Owner do instead?
• A downtown parking-product wall displays a Product Goal, Sprint Goal, and Definition of Done, but leadership treats them as optional posters when a council demo is near. What should the Product Owner do?
• At the end of a Sprint, a 311 resident-request product still has an undone routing rule. A deputy wants it labeled Done so the board report looks complete. What should the Product Owner do?
• A public-health clinic check-in Increment meets the Definition of Done, but the health officer wants to wait two months to batch a big launch. What should the Product Owner ensure about the Increment itself?
• Three Scrum Teams now work on one city building-permit product. Department heads want a Product Owner and a backlog per team. What should the Product Owner maintain?
• On a regional transit-fare product, three teams have each written a different Product Goal—one for mobile wallets, one for paper transfers, one for retailer terminals. What should the Product Owner do?
• Four parks-reservation teams plan to integrate only at the end of the quarter so they can move faster during Sprints. What should the Product Owner require?
• A utilities outage-map product has drifted into three team mini-backlogs with conflicting orders for the same citizen-facing map. What should the Product Owner do?
• Two teams on a building-permit product keep blocking each other because intake, plan-review, and payment slices are ordered independently. How should the Product Owner use ordering to reduce that thrash?
• After slow delivery on a public-health case-management product, the CIO wants to add three Scrum Teams immediately. Product boundaries with clinic records and lab reporting are still unclear. What should the Product Owner seek first?
• Three teams on a city 311 product must agree on a shared Definition of Done. The weakest team wants to drop accessibility and records-retention checks so everyone can keep up. What should the Product Owner support?
• Three Scrum Teams will demo a transit real-time-arrivals product. Each team scheduled its own isolated demo with a different stakeholder group. What should the Product Owner coordinate instead?
• Two Product Owners split a library digital-holds product—one owns discovery and one owns fulfillment—and conflicting orders appear within a week. Why is this an anti-pattern?
• As a parks recreation-booking product scales, the city creates a requirements bureau that writes and sequences backlog items, leaving the Product Owner to communicate them to the teams. What should the candidate identify?