Instructions and covered skills
Complete the test in a quiet setting with notifications turned off. Read each scenario carefully before selecting a response. Focus on the purpose of a Sprint Retrospective: inspecting teamwork, practices, tools, and interactions to identify useful adaptations. Choose the response that best supports openness, shared accountability, and practical follow-through. Do not rush through scenario details or rely on assumptions not stated in the question. Stay focused on retrospective facilitation rather than product planning or stakeholder reporting.
Key Areas
This test examines the capability to facilitate Sprint Retrospectives that help a Scrum Team improve its ways of working. It covers establishing a constructive environment where participants can speak candidly about events, interactions, tools, agreements, and workflow patterns. Strong performance includes recognizing language that shifts discussion away from personal blame and toward observable conditions, team decisions, and process learning.
The assessment also addresses retrospective structure. Candidates should be able to select activities that gather perspectives, identify patterns, explore contributing factors, and close with clear commitments. They should understand how to use delivery data, team observations, and examples from the Sprint without turning the retrospective into a status meeting or a forum for judging individual performance.
A further area is improvement action design. Useful actions are small enough to attempt during the next Sprint, connected to a specific problem, owned by people who can move them forward, and reviewed at a later retrospective. Candidates should distinguish experiments from permanent policy changes and understand how a team can define evidence that indicates whether an experiment helped.
Recommended Preparation
Review the Scrum Guide description of the Sprint Retrospective and its focus on increasing quality and effectiveness. Practice writing retrospective prompts that invite factual observations before interpretations. Become familiar with facilitation techniques such as silent writing, round-robin sharing, working agreements, dot voting, and timeboxing. Consider how each technique can reduce dominance by a few voices and make space for different perspectives.
Prepare by examining examples of improvement actions from real team situations. For each action, identify the problem being addressed, the person or group responsible, the expected signal of progress, and the point when the team will inspect results. Also practice responding to common challenges, including low participation, recurring issues, defensiveness, unresolved conflict, and a long list of possible improvements. The goal is to help the team leave with shared understanding and a manageable adaptation for its next Sprint.