SSM Practice Test 27 — 15 Questions

Question 1

During the ART Sync, the Release Train Engineer asks each Scrum Master to report on their team's progress toward PI Objectives. Team Foxtrot's Scrum Master notices that the team is behind on a key objective because of an unplanned absence. What is the most appropriate action for the Scrum Master to take?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Report the impediment transparently and ask the ART for help in re-planning or reallocating work.. The ART Sync is a frequent event for coordinating progress and addressing impediments across teams. When a team is behind, the Scrum Master should transparently report the issue and seek help from the ART. This enables collective problem-solving, re-planning, or reallocation of work. Hiding the problem, forcing overtime, or waiting for I&A undermines transparency and the ART's ability to adapt.

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Remove the objective from the team's PI Objectives to avoid negative metrics.

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Instruct the team to work overtime to catch up on the objective without informing the ART.

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Wait until the next Inspect and Adapt to discuss the missed objective and its causes.

Question 2

During an Iteration Review, a stakeholder asks the team to demonstrate a feature that was completed but not yet integrated with another team's component. The team cannot show it working end to end. What is the most appropriate Scrum Master action to support the event?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate the team in transparently explaining the integration dependency and capture it as an impediment to address with the other team.. The Scrum Master supports the Iteration Review by protecting transparency and helping the team honestly communicate its actual state. When a feature is not integrated, the team should acknowledge the dependency, capture it as an impediment, and use the event's feedback to plan the next steps rather than masking the gap.

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Instruct the team to demonstrate the feature using mock data so the stakeholder sees the intended behavior.

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Ask the stakeholder to postpone their question until the next System Demo so the team can prepare a proper demonstration.

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Tell the team to quickly integrate the component during the Iteration Review so the stakeholder can see it working.

Question 3

What is the primary role of the Scrum Master in the Iteration Retrospective?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate the meeting to ensure a focus on improvement, safety, and action.. The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator and coach, ensuring the retrospective remains a productive, safe, and focused event. By designing the agenda and moderating the discussion, the Scrum Master helps the team uncover systemic issues and identify actionable improvements. This role is crucial for fostering an environment of continuous improvement and psychological safety where team members feel empowered to share their candid feedback.

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Assign action items to team members to ensure improvements are implemented.

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Take notes and provide a formal report to management after the meeting.

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Directly address individual personality conflicts within the team.

Question 4

A SAFe Scrum Master / Team Coach is working with a team that has become overly dependent on the Scrum Master for resolving impediments. Team members frequently bring problems to the SM instead of collaborating to solve them. The SM wants to shift the team toward self-management. Which approach best aligns with the Scrum Master / Team Coach role?

Accepted Answer

Coach the team on problem-solving techniques and gradually delegate impediment resolution to team members, starting with low-risk issues.. The Scrum Master / Team Coach should coach the team on problem-solving and gradually delegate impediment resolution. This builds the team's self-management skills while ensuring support is available, aligning with the servant leader role of developing people and teams.

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Escalate all impediments to the Release Train Engineer so the team can focus solely on development tasks.

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Stop resolving impediments entirely and tell the team they must handle everything themselves from now on.

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Continue resolving all impediments quickly to maintain team velocity and avoid disrupting the Iteration.

Question 5

A SAFe Scrum Master / Team Coach is coaching a team that has recently adopted SAFe. Which TWO actions best exemplify the servant-leader behavior expected in this role? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Coaching the Product Owner on effective backlog refinement and helping the team improve their estimation and forecasting techniques.. Servant leadership in SAFe involves removing impediments and coaching the team and Product Owner to improve. Removing blockers, whether directly or by escalation, enables the team to focus on value delivery. Coaching the PO and team on refinement and estimation enhances the system. In contrast, assigning tasks, deciding story selection, or escalating performance issues without discussion are command-and-control actions that undermine self-organization and trust.

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Making final decisions on which stories to include in the Iteration to avoid conflicts during Iteration Planning.

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Escalating individual team members' performance issues to their functional manager without discussing them first with the team.

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Assigning each team member their daily tasks to ensure the Iteration plan is followed precisely.

Question 6

During the Iteration Retrospective, the team identifies that technical debt is accumulating rapidly due to rushed user stories. What is the primary role of the SAFe Scrum Master during this event?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate a root-cause analysis discussion to help the team create actionable improvement backlog items.. The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator and servant leader during the Iteration Retrospective, helping the team inspect their processes and identify actionable improvements. By guiding the discussion toward root causes like technical debt, the Scrum Master ensures the team builds sustainable engineering practices into their workflow.

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Impose a mandatory strict coding standard without consulting the development team members.

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Escalate the developers to upper management for poor code quality and demand disciplinary actions.

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Cancel all future retrospectives and reallocate that time strictly to writing more user stories.

Question 7

What is the primary role of the Scrum Master during the Iteration Review?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate the event to ensure it is productive and focuses on feedback.. The Iteration Review is a collaborative event focused on progress and feedback. The Scrum Master serves as the facilitator, ensuring that the team showcases their work effectively and that stakeholders can provide useful feedback. By ensuring the event is well-run, the Scrum Master helps the team learn from their stakeholders, which is crucial for refining the backlog and delivering higher-value work.

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Present the team's work to the stakeholders.

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Determine which stories were completed and which were not.

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Defend the team against negative feedback from stakeholders.

Question 8

A Scrum Master notices that the team's Iteration Review has become a status meeting where the Product Owner reads from a slide deck while stakeholders listen passively. What is the most effective action for the Scrum Master to take?

Accepted Answer

Coach the Product Owner and team on the purpose of the Iteration Review, and help them restructure the event to focus on a demo of the Increment and stakeholder feedback.. The Iteration Review should be a working session where the team demonstrates the Increment and stakeholders provide feedback to adapt the backlog. When it becomes a slide-driven status meeting, the Scrum Master should coach the Product Owner and team on the event's purpose and help redesign the format. This preserves role ownership while restoring the event's value. Simply instructing or escalating would disempower the team and fail to build long-term capability.

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Invite the Release Train Engineer to attend and take over the meeting, ensuring stakeholders receive the information they need.

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Allow the status meeting format to continue, because stakeholders seem engaged and the Product Owner is comfortable with the approach.

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Instruct the Product Owner to stop using slides and instead have team members demonstrate working software to stakeholders.

Question 9

During the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) event, the ART is analyzing metrics and identifies that the Program Predictability Measure has dropped from 85% to 60% over the last PI. As the Scrum Master, what is the most appropriate action to facilitate improvement?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate a problem-solving workshop to identify root causes and create improvement stories for the next PI.. The Inspect and Adapt event culminates in a problem-solving workshop where the ART identifies root causes of issues like declining predictability and creates improvement stories. The Scrum Master facilitates this workshop, ensuring the ART uses data to drive systemic improvements. This approach aligns with SAFe's continuous improvement cycle and empowers teams to own their improvement actions.

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Instruct the teams to lower their PI Objectives to match the actual delivered business value.

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Ask the Release Train Engineer to adjust the Program Predictability Measure calculation to exclude unplanned work.

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Recommend that the ART increase the number of iterations per PI to allow more time for feature completion.

Question 10

During an Iteration Retrospective, the team decides they want to improve their collaboration. What is the Scrum Master's best role in this?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate the discussion to identify specific, actionable improvements and how to measure them.. The Scrum Master's role is to help the team identify actionable improvements and support the execution of those changes. By facilitating a safe environment, the Scrum Master encourages the team to take ownership of their own process. This is crucial because sustainable improvement only happens when the team identifies their own pain points and commits to specific, measurable changes for the next iteration.

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Choose the most important collaboration improvement for the team and assign it as an objective.

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Provide the team with a list of proven collaboration techniques to implement immediately.

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Document the team's concerns but wait for management to provide a solution.

Question 11

A Scrum Master is helping an organization introduce Scrum within SAFe. Leadership asks which TWO activities are appropriate for the Scrum Master when serving the team and the Agile Release Train. (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Facilitating the team's Scrum events and coaching the team on Scrum and SAFe principles.. The Scrum Master serves the team by facilitating Scrum events, coaching Scrum and SAFe principles, and removing impediments, including escalating cross-team blockers through train-level channels. These activities build self-management and support the Agile Release Train. Backlog ownership, architectural decisions, and iteration commitments remain with the Product Owner, architects, and the team respectively.

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Defining the architectural runway and approving the design of each team's enablers.

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Owning the Team Backlog and deciding the order in which user stories are implemented.

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Acting as the primary decision maker for the team's iteration commitments during Iteration Planning.

Question 12

During the Daily Stand-up, a developer spends several minutes detailing a highly technical architectural disagreement with another developer. What should the Scrum Master do?

Accepted Answer

Interrupt the discussion and ask the two developers to hold a 'meet-after' to resolve the issue.. The Daily Stand-up is a time-boxed, 15-minute event meant for synchronization, not deep-dive problem solving. The Scrum Master must protect the meeting's purpose and ensure it remains focused on progress toward the Iteration Goal. By redirecting deep technical discussions to a follow-up meeting, the Scrum Master respects the team's time while ensuring the technical issue gets the attention it requires.

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Allow the discussion to continue so the issue is resolved immediately.

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Join the debate to provide an expert opinion and force a quick resolution.

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End the Daily Stand-up immediately as the team is clearly not aligned.

Question 13

A Scrum Master is preparing to facilitate the Iteration Review for a team that has completed several stories and one enabler. The Product Owner will attend, along with stakeholders from other teams. What is the Scrum Master's primary responsibility during this event?

Accepted Answer

Facilitate the event so the team and stakeholders can inspect the increment and adapt the backlog based on feedback.. The Iteration Review exists so the team and stakeholders can inspect the completed increment and adapt the backlog. The Scrum Master facilitates this inspection and adaptation by managing the timebox, encouraging participation, and helping the Product Owner capture feedback. The team demonstrates the work, and the Product Owner owns backlog changes. Facilitation keeps the event focused on product outcomes rather than metrics or technical explanation.

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Present the team's velocity metrics and compare them to other teams in the Agile Release Train.

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Demonstrate each completed story to stakeholders and answer technical questions about the implementation.

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Collect feedback from stakeholders and rewrite the acceptance criteria for unfinished stories before the next iteration.

Question 14

During an Iteration Retrospective, a Scrum Master facilitates a team that has identified several process problems but is now stuck in vague complaints. The Scrum Master wants to help the team produce a small number of actionable improvement items that can be completed within the next iteration. (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Ask the team to limit improvements to one or two items and assign a single owner and due date for each.. When a team is stuck in vague complaints, the Scrum Master should introduce structure and limit the number of improvements. Start-Stop-Continue converts observations into concrete behaviors, while limiting improvements to one or two with a single owner and due date creates accountability. Together these practices help the team produce actionable outcomes within the iteration and avoid the trap of overcommitting to too many changes.

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Extend the retrospective by an hour to ensure every complaint is fully analyzed before selecting improvements.

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Ask each team member to write a personal improvement goal and track it privately without team discussion.

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Document all identified problems in the team's backlog so the Product Owner can prioritize them alongside features.

Question 15

A Scrum Master is preparing for the team's first PI Planning. The team has never created PI Objectives before. What guidance should the Scrum Master provide?

Accepted Answer

PI Objectives should describe the business value the team intends to deliver in the PI, and each should have a planned business value assigned.. PI Objectives communicate the business value a team intends to deliver during the PI and are assigned planned business values. They are created collaboratively, shared transparently, and are not a detailed story list. The other options misrepresent their purpose, audience, or authorship.

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PI Objectives should be a detailed list of every user story the team will complete in the PI.

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PI Objectives should be written only by the Product Owner without team input.

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PI Objectives should be kept private to the team and not shared with stakeholders.