User Stories and Acceptance Criteria

Correct Answer: Empower the team to self-organize and collaboratively decide on the acceptance criteria, offering support if needed.

The correct answer promotes self-organization and collaboration, which are key Scrum principles. The Scrum Master's role involves coaching the team to find solutions themselves and facilitating discussions if necessary, rather than providing decisions or allowing a single perspective to dominate. Voting can silence minority viewpoints, breaking the user story does not solve the issue of undefined acceptance criteria, and delegating decision-making to the Scrum Master undermines the team's autonomy and self-organization capabilities.

Correct Answer: Explain to the stakeholder that changes affecting the sprint goals can only be incorporated in the next sprint.

In Scrum, it's important to finish the sprint as planned. The focus of the Scrum team is to produce a potentially shippable increment of the product by the end of the sprint. If a stakeholder wants to change a user story that affects the acceptance criteria significantly in the middle of a sprint, the best action from a Scrum Master's point of view would be to explain to the stakeholder that these changes can be incorporated in the next sprint, because it would affect the team's focus and velocity - Explanation for answer 'Explain to the stakeholder that changes affecting the sprint goals can only be incorporated in the next sprint'. On the other hand, 'Immediately implement the adjustment without consulting the product owner or development team' is wrong, as it ignores Scrum principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation, in which the whole team is involved in decision-making. 'Ignoring the stakeholder's demand, only the product owner can request changes' is not a good practice, as Scrum promotes an environment where stakeholders can express their needs. Finally, 'Stopping the current sprint to accommodate the changes' should be a last resort option, and may signal problems in the sprint planning or communication with stakeholders.

Correct Answer: Encourage the Product Owner to solicit feedback from stakeholders to refine the user story with appropriate acceptance criteria.

Acceptance criteria provide clarity and a shared understanding of what is needed for a user story to be considered complete. The correct approach encourages collaboration between the Product Owner and stakeholders, ensuring that the acceptance criteria reflect the needs and expectations of the end-users. Creating acceptance criteria without collaboration or delaying work on a story can lead to misunderstandings, incorrectly implemented features, or work that doesn't align with the product vision. A Spike is a specific type of story that is used to research, explore, or investigate, but deciding on acceptance criteria without input from the Product Owner can lead to discrepancies between what is developed and what is actually needed.