Agile Estimating and Planning

Correct Answer: Re-asses the story, break it down into smaller tasks if necessary and re-estimate

The most appropriate response to a high story point estimate is to reassess the story. If a user story has significantly more points than the others, it might mean the story is too large or complex and should be broken down into smaller, manageable tasks. This is the premise behind agile methodologies where end-goals are decomposed into smaller achievable tasks to ensure continual delivery. Simply lowering the story points to match other estimates is not proper as it can lead to underestimation and scheduling issues. Removing the story from the product backlog is not suitable because the feature might be vital for delivering a complete product to the user. Forcing the team to work extra hours to complete it, not only goes against the Agile principle of sustainable development but can also lead to burnout and reduced productivity in the long term. So the best practice is to reassess the user story, possibly break it into more manageable tasks, and then re-estimate the story points.

Correct Answer: Facilitate a discussion between the development team and the Product Owner to prioritize the most important user stories that can be realistically completed within the sprint.

The best answer in this situation is to facilitate a discussion between the development team and the Product Owner to prioritize the most important user stories that can be realistically completed within the sprint. This approach aligns with the Scrum values of collaboration, transparency, and respect. The Scrum Master should act as a facilitator to ensure that the development team and the Product Owner reach a consensus on what can be achieved in the sprint, considering the team's capacity and the priority of the user stories. Convincing the development team to accept additional work beyond their capacity goes against sustainable development practices and may lead to decreased quality and team burnout. Adjusting the sprint duration to accommodate more stories defeats the purpose of time-boxing and may disrupt the team's rhythm. Encouraging the team to overcommit to satisfy the Product Owner's demands undermines the team's self-organization and autonomy, which are core principles of Scrum.

Correct Answer: Break down the user story into several smaller, manageable pieces.

In Scrum, if a user story is too big to be completed in a single sprint, the best approach is to break it down into several smaller, manageable pieces. This allows the team to better understand the tasks at hand, estimate the work more accurately and tackle the work in a more manageable way. Assigning additional resources to complete the user story in one sprint doesn't adhere to the principles of Scrum as it doesn't address the fundamental issue of the story being too large. Also, neglecting the story point estimation and committing to it in one sprint would only overburden the team and potentially lead to quality issues. Excluding the user story from the product backlog is not a solution as it only avoids the problem instead of addressing it.