Day Six, Two Constraints
Two-week Sprint, five Developers. Sprint Goal: 'Customers can reset their password without raising a support ticket.' It is day 6 of 10. A compliance officer states that a new audit-log field is mandatory within 10 days or legal blocks the release. A Developer discovers the email service rate-limits at 200 messages per hour, so the reset flow will fail at expected volume; fixing it needs roughly three Developer-days. Twenty-two Developer-days remain in the Sprint across the team. The Sprint Backlog holds six items, one of which is an unrelated marketing banner. The Product Owner is on leave for two days. The Scrum Master has already told the compliance officer, 'we will fit it in.'
1. Which actions taken so far fall outside Scrum's accountabilities, and who should make each decision?
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The Scrum Master's commitment. Saying 'we will fit it in' commits the Developers' capacity and the Product Owner's ordering to a scope change. The Scrum Master does not hold either accountability. The correct move is to relay the constraint accurately and get the decision made by the people who own it: 'Legal has told us X. Here is what it does to the Sprint Goal. The Product Owner decides what enters the Sprint.'
Silence on the rate limit. A three-Developer-day discovery against twenty-two remaining is material. Hiding it until the Review would be a failure of transparency, which is the Scrum Master's legitimate territory.
Who decides what:
- Does the audit field enter this Sprint, and does the marketing banner drop? Product Owner - they own Product Backlog ordering and the value trade-off. Delegation while on leave must be arranged in advance; if it was not, that is the gap to close.
- How the work is decomposed and who does what? Developers - self-managing.
- Whether the Sprint is cancelled? Product Owner only, and only if the Sprint Goal has become obsolete.
- Coaching the team through the trade-off and surfacing the impediment (the two-day PO absence)? Scrum Master.
Note what is not on the list: the Scrum Master deciding, and the compliance officer deciding. The compliance officer supplies a constraint; they do not order the backlog.
2. Should the Sprint be cancelled, should the Sprint Goal be renegotiated, or should the Sprint Backlog be adapted? Show the evidence that drives the choice.
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Cancellation is the wrong instrument here. A Sprint is cancelled only when the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete - that is, when it no longer makes sense to pursue it. Nothing in this setup makes password reset obsolete. Cancellation would discard six days of work and return the team to Sprint Planning with the same problem.
The evidence, stated plainly:
- Capacity: 22 Developer-days remaining against an unknown but bounded plan. Three of those days are now known rework. That is ~14% of remaining capacity, not a plan-destroying event.
- The rate limit is not optional. A reset flow that fails at volume does not achieve the Sprint Goal. Fixing it is inside the goal, not scope creep.
- The audit field is the genuinely contested item. Two readings are possible: (a) it is a legal precondition for shipping password reset, in which case it serves the Sprint Goal and belongs in the Sprint; or (b) it is unrelated compliance work that happens to be urgent, in which case it competes with the goal and the Product Owner must decide whether the goal survives.
The Scrum Master should not resolve (a) vs (b) alone. Get the compliance officer and the Product Owner (or delegate) to state in one sentence whether the release is blocked without the field. That answer determines everything downstream.
The marketing banner is the pressure-release valve. It is already known to be unrelated to the goal. Dropping it is the cheapest capacity the team has, and it is a Product Owner decision made visible, not an SM improvisation.
3. What exactly gets updated, in which artifact, by whom, and by when?
Read the worked answer
| Artifact | Change | Owner | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprint Backlog | Add the rate-limit fix; remove the marketing banner if the PO agrees; re-estimate remaining work | Developers | At the next Daily Scrum, same day |
| Product Backlog | Reorder so the audit field is positioned according to its actual value and urgency; record the compliance constraint | Product Owner (or named delegate) | Within 24 hours - do not wait for the return from leave |
| Sprint Goal | Unchanged, unless the audit field is judged unrelated and displacing enough work to make the goal unreachable - then the PO renegotiates it with the Developers | Product Owner with Developers | Only after the compliance question is answered |
| Definition of Done | If legal requires the audit field for any release, raise it: this is quality criteria, not a backlog item | Developers, with PO consulted | Before the next Sprint at the latest |
Two details that decide whether this is judgement or theatre:
- The Sprint Goal is not renegotiated as a reflex. Its purpose is to give the team something to hold steady while scope moves. Renegotiating it the first time a constraint appears trains the team that the goal means nothing.
- The compliance question is answered by the business, not absorbed by the team. If nobody can say whether the release is blocked without the field, the team will either build it unnecessarily or ship without it and be surprised. That is the Scrum Master's real job on day 6: get a decision, not a plan.