Your development team has been consistently achieving their sprint goals for the past four sprints with a stable velocity of 30 story points. In sprint planning for the next iteration, the team commits to 30 points of work. However, by mid-sprint during the daily standup, it becomes clear that three critical stories are blocked due to an unexpected production outage requiring immediate team attention. The team estimates they can only complete 18 points this sprint. What should the scrum master do?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is A. Removing lower-priority stories to match realistic capacity (option A) maintains transparency and allows the team to still deliver a valuable increment while responding to changing circumstances (PMBOK 8 Principle of Embrace Adaptability and Resiliency). This demonstrates adaptive planning and protects the sprint goal by focusing on what can realistically be completed. Option B violates sustainable pace and leads to burnout, which is counter to agile values. Option C misrepresents progress and prevents stakeholders from understanding actual capacity, damaging trust and transparency. Option D is too extreme—sprint cancellation is only warranted when the sprint goal becomes obsolete, not when capacity is reduced. The production outage is being handled, and the team can still deliver value with adjusted scope. This scenario tests understanding of how to balance commitment with empiricism and adaptation in agile environments.

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