CSM Scrum Events Practice Question
A Scrum Team has experienced low stakeholder attendance at their Sprint Reviews for three consecutive iterations. The Developers suggest canceling the Sprint Review and instead sending a written progress report via email. How should the Scrum Master respond?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often suggest replacing the event with documentation or email. This ignores the core Scrum principle of empiricism, which requires live inspection and adaptation with stakeholders to provide real value.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Facilitate a discussion with the Product Owner and team to discover why stakeholders are absent, coaching them to demonstrate tangible value.
The Sprint Review is a collaborative inspect-and-adapt event designed for active stakeholder engagement and feedback, not a status reporting meeting. Replacing it with an email destroys transparency and eliminates the empirical loop. The Scrum Master must coach the team and Product Owner on engaging stakeholders effectively rather than bypassing the core event.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Approve the email report format temporarily, provided the stakeholders reply with their written feedback within forty-eight hours.
Why it's wrong here
Sprint Reviews exist to inspect the Increment and adapt the Product Backlog through direct stakeholder collaboration; a written report removes that empiricism and the Developers' accountability for a usable Increment. It tempts because asynchronous updates suit distributed stakeholders, but the Scrum Master should address attendance causes instead.
- ✓
Facilitate a discussion with the Product Owner and team to discover why stakeholders are absent, coaching them to demonstrate tangible value.
Why this is correct
Low stakeholder attendance indicates a deeper problem regarding the perceived value of the event or poor stakeholder management. The Scrum Master must address the root cause by helping the Product Owner communicate the strategic importance of the inspect-and-adapt session.
- ✗
Escalate the stakeholder absence to senior management and mandate their attendance at all future Sprint Reviews through company policy.
Why it's wrong here
Mandating attendance through policy replaces self-management and stakeholder engagement with command-and-control, which contradicts Scrum's empirical approach; the Scrum Master should coach the team to understand why attendance dropped. Escalation tempts as a quick fix when stakeholders genuinely lack authority or sponsorship, but that is a stakeholder-engagement problem, not a policy one.
- ✗
Agree to cancel the Sprint Review and allocate those four hours directly to the Developers for additional refactoring and technical debt reduction.
Why it's wrong here
Canceling the Sprint Review to gain coding time destroys the mandatory inspection loop required to validate product direction. Technical debt management belongs in Sprint Planning and daily execution, not as a direct trade-off against vital stakeholder alignment events.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Scrum Alliance exam blueprint
This CSM practice question is part of Courseiva's free Scrum Alliance certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CSM exam.