One of the parameters you are measured against in the Professional Scrum Master assessment or the PSM I assessment is the events. There are 5 events in scrum and all the events have a time-box, that is the maximum amount of time that the event can take place for.  If you can achieve the outcome of a particular event in much less time, great, move on with the sprint.

These events are Sprint planning, Daily scrum, Sprint review, sprint retrospective and the sprint itself, which is the container event in which all other 4 events take place. All the events create an inspection and adaptation feedback loop. That is, In every event, we are inspecting some information that became transparent and then we are adapting towards the right course to provide value. So its important to remember that if you are not doing even any one of these events, you are not doing scrum, Even though something is working for you in your context. A question you might get in the PSM I exam could be, lets say a self organized team decides to stop doing sprint retrospective, what would you do as a scrum master? Would you comply with the decision of a self managed team, would you escalate or would you consult others in the team? None of these would be the right choice because self management is effective only against the boundaries that the framework provides & These events and time boxes are those boundaries. So, your approach for such questions should be to ensure that the scrum team understand the why behind these events and if needed facilitate some productive sessions to get them started.

So all events have a clear expectation, a clear inspection and adaptation, which you should be very clear before sitting for the PSM 1 assessment, like the Sprint planning,  you are inspecting the Product backlog to define the Why, What and how though a sprint backlog. The daily scrum you are inspecting the Sprint goal and updating the Sprint backlog to reflect the work needed. The Sprint review you are inspecting the Increment and deciding what’s best to do next and finally the Sprint retrospective which is a vault for the scrum team to decide how to improve ourselves as a scrum team and also to improve the quality of our deliverables.

To check your understating, you may get a straight forward question like, Which option best describes the activity covered in Sprint retrospective or Sprint planning or any of the events. You could also get a question like, Who should attend the daily scrum? The keywords to watch out for such questions are must, should, could, so this question is asking you, who at a minimum is needed for the daily scrum, and we know that its only the developers. Others may join to listen in as long as they are not interrupting the discussion, we can always park their questions for later. You may also get questions around what is the time box for a specific event or a question around sprint 0, hardening sprint, stabilization sprint or release sprint, remember those do not exist in scrum. The only rule around that is that a sprint is 30 days or less and the entire point of scrum is to get to done.

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